Workshop Blog Post (2)

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 better. Finally, the last insight I gained from our workshop was the development of themes throughout the poem. A poem becomes a lot more interesting if there’s a running theme (idea or emotion) throughout, because then there’s a clear beginning and end. For one of the poems, it started of by subtly introducing a theme of colour, and it was laced throughout the poem, finally all coming together again in the last line. This poem flowed very well and was easy to analyze because the author emphasized the main idea for the poem. One thing I can do differently during workshop is probably trying to stay on topic for the poem we’re analyzing, because our group used to get off topic often and end up spending a long time analyzing one poem. If we stayed on topic more, we could have a more constructive conversation.

My poem was workshopped today, and my group gave me a lot of useful feedback by pointing out my strengths and weaknesses. Some of the strengths they mentioned were my good use of nuanced language that were all related to one theme, how I had vivid imagery and strong descriptive words, and how my poem had good flow and structure. However, they also pointed out a lot of weaknesses. The main problem was how confusing my point of view was, because everyone analyzed my point of view differently, therefore it often didn’t make sense. I need to elaborate where my speaker is, and what exactly is going on in the poem. Also, a few people mentioned one of my descriptors were cliche because I compared the sun to “an eye,” so they suggested I change that. However, they told me I had clear and effective tone shifts throughout my poem, except the message I was trying to convey wasn’t as clear as it could have been. Overall, my group repeatedly mentioned how much they enjoyed reading my poem because it flowed well and was very connected.

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