Bird by Bird and Poetry

Last Tuesday in class I talked about a book we read called “City Eclogue”.  The book was a compilation of poems about a city, probably a city the author grew up in.  I didn’t know about what an Eclogue was, so like usual I went to Wikipedia, where I learned that Eclogue is part of Pastoral literature where topics are described in simple format.  Poems in the book would go over simple subjects like a road, the title “as it crested the hill”.  A line from the poem, “The street as it crested the hill, the buildings on each side of a moon bridge”.  The poems were also set up in an interesting way with lots of “white space” in what I thought was a way where the author wanted the reader to focus on specific concepts.  An example of this is how on page 26, the author writes “someone may want” and then the next line down continue with “to know one day how many steps we took”.  At first looking at the poem was confusing, but after talking about them in class I got a better idea of what the author was trying to get at.

After going over the eclogues, the groups went over poems we wrote.  The poems I wrote were set as a sonnet and a journey poem.  Writing out the poems was a lot harder than I originally thought.  I first had to look up for sonnets were written out and learned that Shakespearean sonnets went in a pattern of ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG.  Each section had alternating lines that rhyme and the last two summarizes.  The journey poem was based on what we listened to in class about a city in the Ukraine.  In order to not use “cliché” words used in poetry, I looked up different words from a thesaurus.  Some of the words I wasn’t sure if I was using them properly, so I needed to look up the word in the dictionary.  In our groups during class, we handed a copy to the professor and the other we passed to our group members for critique.  I’m pretty sure my poems were crap and so getting critiqued by my classmates was very helpful and informative since they have more experience writing poems than I do. 

Writing poems really helped to tie in with the book “Bird by Bird” where the author talks about just getting your thoughts on paper and the way her students asked her what to write.  In the book the author says, “You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day”.  Reading the chapters really got me to understand that writing was just a simple process.  The author provides interesting examples about how she uses her childhood experiences and just different memories being used as inspiration.  The way she talks about interacting with her students is interesting too.  Reading the book is very engaging and getting me to get interested in learning how to write.