Shivani's SAS Blog

This is the concrete candle holder I made in class. We got a mould outline on paper, and I taped this outline to a piece of plastic poster board. Using an x-acto knife, I cut out the mould, and lightly marked the folds by making shallow cuts with the blade. Since I used x-acto knives in my summer architectural program, I already had some experience. I'm grateful for this experience, because a cleaner mould cutout created straight edges in my concrete candle holder.  The left photo is of my concrete structure still in it's mould of a plastic bottle. The hole in the middle was created by placing a straw in wet concrete, and I let this dry by leaning the bottle against a roll of tape to create a "slant" effect. I was going for an abstract, unique structure, and I think I succeeded. 

The insights I got from the 2nd day of workshops were mainly a better understanding of poetry and literary devices compared to last class. My top three insights were how detrimental abstract words can be, how important the structure of your poem is, and themes. While analyzing poems, a lot of us used abstract words, and sometimes they’re useful, but most of the time they’re confusing for the reader. This is because we were trying to describe an abstract topic with abstract words, making the poem very uncertain for the reader, because there were so many ways to analyze it. Secondly, I realized how important structure is for a poem. For one of the poems we read, there were no stanza breaks, and the line breaks were all random. This made it very confusing for the reader, because although there were tone and even subject shifts during the poem, since it was all bunched together that made it hard to separate. If there was a stanza break at the tone shift, the poem would have flowed much...

The top three insights about writing I got from the workshop today were the importance of the speaker, nuanced language, and imagery. During our workshop conversation, many of the speakers in the poems we analyzed were quite confusing, because the author didn’t provide enough detail on who was speaking. This often made the entire poem confusing because we didn’t know the point of view. Next, I realized how important nuanced language is in poetry and writing, because one word can have many different connotations. Sometimes, these connotations are implied, but sometimes it can be a mistake, so you have to make sure to use purposeful words while writing because it can be analyzed the wrong way. Finally, I noticed how vivid imagery in poetry added a deeper level for the reader to observe, because along with the tone shifts and emotions from the poem, the reader can now visualize the setting and the subject. Vivid imagery makes the poem more interesting and engaging for the audience. One...