“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words”

-Robert Frost

Hi everyone and welcome back to my 4th, and final, blog. When I started this unit, almost a semester ago, and learned everything we would undertake in these last few months, I honestly thought it was impossible. Yet here I am, a week away from presently a 10 minute (ish) long performance on poetry, and while yes, it has certainly been difficult, and has its ups and downs, we’ve all proved to ourselves, that it is in fact possible.

Since my last blog, we’ve all been writing, deleting, rewriting, and editing poetry, as well as writing a speech to go along with all these very thoroughly written poems. It doesn’t seem that long ago that we had months before we had to have this performance-ready, but time really does fly and looking back, we’ve achieved a lot in these last few weeks, not only finishing the task, and overcoming any barriers along the way, but also writing a speech, making a performance, and adding movement to all our poems.

Our topic, women’s equality, has been a really big topic to undertake, and it’s been really interesting, and a little bit shocking, to put myself in the shoes of many different women, from all times and places, and find out what life was really like for them. It’s also been really inspiring to see how far we’ve come as a society, and how hard the women before us had to fight for what we expect.

Over this entire unit, I feel as though my poetry writing, and performing skills have improved a lot. Of course, Angela Pieta is partially to thank for this when she came in again, and helped us gain confidence in performing our poetry, and showed us some ways to plan how we say certain things in our performance, and movement within the performance. She helped us to notice little things about a person while they are talking, and showed us what worked, and what didn’t. We also got a chance to perform in front of the rest of the class. Since the last time we performed poetry in front of each other, we’ve all developed our own style, so it was nice to see what everyone else’s poetry and performance styles were.

Overall, this unit has been full of ups and downs, but I really think it will all be worth it when we perform next week, proud of what we have achieved as individuals and a group. But there’s one question that still remains unanswered, after everything that’s happened. Why do we turn to poetry in key moments of our lives? We know that humans have been writing poetry since practically the beginning of time, but nobody really knows why. So many things have been phased out of society, and a lot of them are probably for the best, but why has poetry stayed? For me, in this performance, poetry has allowed me to tell the stories of women who can’t tell their own. It has let me make sure they are not forgotten or left behind and their contributions to the world, however small they might be, are recognised. I think people may turn to poetry because it’s there. It consistent, but it can also change to be whatever you need it to be at the time, and whether the poetry is kept private, or shared, it will always be there. I think everyone may have a different idea as to why people turn to poetry, and I think they are all correct. 

So as this unit and this year come to an end, I think it’s safe to say that everyone in the year 9 Aspire English class has come a long way since we started this unit and that there is going to be some very different, but very good performances to look forward to next week. 

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart”

-William Wordsworth

Hi everyone,

At the time I wrote my last blog we were still doing a lot of looking at other people’s poetry, but over the last 6 weeks we’ve started focusing more on our own. At the end of last term, we had a couple of weeks to really experiment with our poetry, find our own style, and see what we like to write about. Once we got into this term, it was time to really start working on our assignment in our groups, and plan what we’d be doing for the next 6 weeks.

After the Brisbane’s writer’s festival, I was pretty inspired to start writing my own poetry, but in the next lesson, when I sat down in front of my computer, ready to write a perfect poem first go, I realised I was a little bit lost. I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, or how I wanted to write about it, but that’s what the end of last term was all about for me, improvement. While my first few poems were a little bit rocky, and didn’t flow quite as well as I would’ve liked, as time went on, I found my style, and writing poetry because easier, and more enjoyable. Through this experimental time, I found that the style of poetry I like writing best is rhyming slam, which became really helpful this term for our task.

This semester, our task is to create a poetry performance about a certain issue, in groups of 3 and 4, which incorporates our own poetry, others poetry, facts and statistics, and talking. The issue my group has chosen is women’s equality throughout time, I am writing a poem about women in the 1800’s, and the three other people in my group are writing it about 1900’s, 2000’s and 2100’s. So far, I have a rough draft of my poem ready for editing and some changes, and still have to write the talk to go with it, find some extra poems and hopefully write one more poem. Our goal is to show the improvements throughout time, and try to express what women’s lives were, are, and hopefully will be like, and to share the stories of women who never got to do it themselves.

So now, here’s my thoughts, in every blog I ask the question of why we turn to poetry at key moments in our lives, and throughout this entire unit, it seems the more I learn about poetry and poets, the less clear the answer is, however, after doing some thinking, another possible answer I’ve come up with is to tell the truth, and to understand. Through poetry, you can tell the truth in ways you couldn’t normally. You can tell the truth just through the emotions you express, or you can tell a story through your poems. Poetry helps you understand. When you read a good poem, you feel like you can understand what the other person is thinking and feeling, and when you write poetry, you understand what you are thinking and feeling, and you process that. Poetry is permanent, and when a poem is written about a moment in time, that moment can be relived over and over again, by millions of different people, forever, just by reading it.

“Poetry is the conversation your soul has with the world when you decide to start telling the truth.”

-Anisa Nanduala

Over the past few weeks a lot has happened in class, and my attitude towards poetry, as well as my beliefs about it have changed quite a bit.

Since I last posted, we been to the Brisbane writers festival, and seen a phenomenal poet, had a workshop with an incredibly talented guest speaker, and had a crack at writing some of our own poetry. While some of these things were more successful than others (it’s safe to say I’m no Oscar Wilde), they have all influenced how I think and feel about poetry.

First, we had Angela Pieta come in as a guest speaker, which was undoubtedly a really fun lesson for everyone. Somehow, she managed to transform us from 18 kids, who didn’t think they were creative, to 18 poets, writing about school being placebo medication. Angela showed me that poetry, can be about whatever I want it to be about, and there is no right or wrong way to write a poem.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite enough to make me an incredible poet, and when we started writing poetry in class, my first few, were pretty rough. To start, I wrote a metaphor poem, about metaphors. I compared metaphors to sand, music and a computer. I also managed to rhyme computer, with router. However, with more practise, I am happy to say that I definitely improved, and with that, my confidence in writing poetry skyrocketed.

Finally, we went to the Brisbane Writers Festival, and while the poet we were there to see, couldn’t make it, his replacement, exceeded all our expectations. Anisa Nanduala shared some of her poems with us , gave us some handy tips, and asked us all some pretty tricky questions. While I couldn’t personally relate to the things she spoke about through her poetry, the way she wrote them made me feel like I was right there next to her in every situation she described. During the talk, she asked us about our ‘why’. Why do we write poetry? What is important to us? What are we passionate about? I don’t really know my ‘why’ yet. There are so many different reasons I write, and it will be hard to narrow it down to just one, but I can see why knowing your ‘why’ would be so important to give you direction.

It 8 weeks into this unit, and the question of why we turn to poetry at key moments of our lives is still out there. A new answer I have been introduced to is ‘truth’. Poetry is the easiest way to share the truth, how you truly feel, and who you truly are, but maybe we turn to poetry at key moments in our life for different reasons, maybe, just like the. definition of poetry, there is no one answer, maybe everyone has a different reason, and maybe, your ‘why’ is your reason.

When I first heard we were doing poetry this semester, I was a little bit weary. I loved to read poetry and I could recite it fine, but when it comes to actually writing poetry, I wasn’t so confident. To me then, poetry felt like it had to be about big, emotive, real things. I felt I couldn’t do whatever topic I chose justice, or that writing a poem about something so huge would leave me vulnerable. If I’m being honest, the thought of having to put my feeling down on a piece of paper terrified me, but over the last 4 weeks, I’ve learnt that good poetry doesn’t have to be about topics so large, and while that still makes a good poem, smaller topics can still create an amazing poem.

I’ve also learnt that poetry has been around forever, and that poets hundreds of years ago, and maybe today as well, were a little bit eccentric. For example, there was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose husband, Robert Browning, had the same name as her son, Robert Barrett Browning, and she was one of the more normal ones. I mean there was Lord Byron who married his sister in the romantic era, and that’s just two examples, but what really is poetry, and what makes something a poem.

At the start of this unit we were asked to write a definition of poetry, this was mine,

“Poetry is artistically rendered words specifically using rhythm to express feelings of the poet or evoke emotion from the reader whilst reading it. It is something that is very important to the writer. Poetry affects every reader in a different way and cannot be defined on the whole as each poem evokes varying responses for each individual.”

One thing that still scares me a bit about poetry is picking a topic. As someone who wrote a literal poem above being indecisive last year, deciding, isn’t really my strong suit. It feels like I have to pick a topic that is perfect, and if it’s not, then the poem is going to be terrible. So many of the best poems were written from raw emotions, sorrow, desperation, and love. They all came from soldiers, always one step away from death, or parents, losing a child, or two people, hopelessly in love. They are all such powerful emotions, and it feels like the topic needs to be as well.

People have been turning to poetry for centuries, whenever something went wrong, or right there was always a poet there. Whenever there was something they didn’t understand, poetry seemed to put it in words. No matter how big or small a situation is, not matter what someone is feeling, there always seems to be a poem to fit it exactly. So why is it, that after all this time, we still turn to poetry in key moments of our lives?