Keeping Things Whole- POL

To start things off, I am reading the poem "Keeping Things Whole" by Mark Strand. When choosing our poems for the Poetry Out Loud competition, I was instantly drawn to this poem due to its title. When I read  it, it made a lot of sense to me. Although there were very few stanzas, I felt like it had quality and more meaning than the others. Due to its shortness I continued to keep searching for something that seemed more "complex". When I searched, everything seemed to have useless words and phrases which really did not help me see what they were truly about. I felt like "Keeping Things Whole" would be the best choice because it is simplistic yet has a strong meaning.

In the idea of relevance to my life, there isn't a really definite comparison. I felt that this poem is somewhat relative to the idea that the narrator's life is lacking purpose. He understands that he must keep moving and going on with his life even though he is interrupting the existence and paths of others. This can compare with my life because I often ponder over the idea of waking up everyday and going through this scheduled routine. After reading this, the ideal thought that came to my mind was "Why do I keep moving?'.

How will I convey this in my performance? I'm definitely thinking of a sort of sad voice, but also in a wondering/questionable to show that I'm not sure about life. At the end I will draw more sadness or somewhat monotone to convey that I have accepted life being this way and I just need to keep moving. With facial gestures, I will obviously express the facial gestures that go along with my tone. Hand gestures, on the other hand (pun), are a different story. I'm not going to use anything very dramatic but more subtle such as a tap on my leg or a finger tapping my head/lip to show that I am pondering. Hopefully all goes well in my performance!

The "Urgent! Extra Credit Blog" on 5 Part Paragraph Skills

Going over my old blog post helped me a lot. Even though I wrote it, I kind of completely forgot about those skills which would enrich my paper. These skills helped develop my new paper in many ways. One being, that I chose stronger transitions. I made sure to have strong transitions so they they did not flow in with everything else and were recognizable. That was helpful because it is so important to make sure it is clear when you are trying to make a new point. Another way being that I made sure my commentary was well written. I did not just restate and restate everything but instead I made it my own. The commentary written in my new paper was my actual thoughts on what I thought the quote meant and what the author was trying to  get across. Thanks to Mrs. Gilman for posting this so that I could rethink and improve the quality of my paper.

Poetry Out Loud

EATING POETRY

QUEENS CEMETERY, SETTING SUN

CARMEL HIGHLANDS

GOOD PEOPLE

I DREAMED THAT I WAS OLD

Of these five poems, I most enjoyed "Eating Poetry". I thought it was humorous and although it had a small message that this man absorbed poetry and was a better man for it. Would I want to recite this poem? Probably not, I feel as if it would be on the side newspaper column for one's small self enjoyment.

I did not like "I Dreamed That I Was Old". This poem was very sad and depressing to me. I do not like thinking about my death and longing for my youth.

Of these six poems, I am most interested "Good People". Although I'm not confident this is the poem I will be further studying.

I personally connected with "Good People" because it talks about parents and children. Obviously I can relate being that I am a child and I have parents.

The criteria that will be easiest is to make a connection with the audience. I feel like this will be easiest because I find it very simple to generally scan and make somewhat of eye contact with the audience as I am reading.

The criteria that will be hardest for me will be to "relax and act natural". This will be a problem because when reading I will want to get into a character.

Another criteria I will struggle with is to "not say rhyming poems in a sing-song manner". That will be difficult because I find myself wanting to just kind of let it flow instead of breaking it up so that it does not sound like a song.

Videos:
I watched "I am Waiting" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This was a successful performance to me because the way the girl recited it made me think that she was actually thinking those words and that she was a part of it. Her small hand gestures fit great while she was speaking and were not too big so that it was not distracting.

I also watched "Man-Moth" by Elizabeth Bishop. This was successful because the guy reciting it was very well paced and his pauses in between words gave a dramatic effect. His gestures and flow through the poem were great.

I feel like this competition will be very competitive and there will be kids who are very serious about winning. I think I will do fine, I'm not expecting to win obviously. I have not yet decided the poem I want to memorize yet but I will in due time. I think this is a great website if you are studying or learning about poetry. It very resourceful to say the least.

Important Skills: Extra Credit

Although I'm not positive if this is considered a skill, I feel that learning to annotate literature has defintiely been one of the most important things I have learned thus far. When asked to annotate our outside reading book I wasn't confident on what was being asked of me. Later on I grasped the idea and was annotating as I read. I felt as if I gained so much while annotating because each word I was reading I was saying to myslef "Okay, does this have a sybolic/literal meaning?" or "What is the author trying to say behind this?". Typically when I read a novel before I would understand the obvious meaning while running past the deeper meaning and figuratve language to where parts of the book became a massive blur. By annotating I literally study every page to comprehend farther than the average person would see. Not only do I now gain a deeper understanding for novels including their authors but I can also gain a new perspective on life itself.

(TWIST was a great way to do this)

Something Interesting

During the "Lobsters" fishbowl discussion I learned a lot about what the piece could be and what it means. Some ideas I had already thought about and others were semi-new. One comment that really gave me a new perspective on the poem was the idea of slave trade. Way back when people picked and chose their slaves relates to how in the story we pick and chose our lobsters. It was sort of the idea that we were the superior looking down upon someone or something. It also went along with the idea of when you take something out of its place it probably won't be the same. Such as taking the slaves out of the South, and taking lobsters out of the ocean for us to go out and buy/eat.

 I learned that some may fit in and are beautiful where they belong but when taken somewhere else they may be insignificant or looked down upon. Rather than thinking about the typical suggestions, I'm now thinking about historical references to times such as slave trade and even the Holocaust. Hearing that one of Mrs. Gilman's previous students researched that the author was involved in the war really geared my direction towards those kinds of ideas. I feel like this helped me see beyond then what I have been thinking this week about the poem and I have gained a new perspective on this piece of literature.

So many paragraphs, so many skills

For the third period class of Mrs. Gilman, none of the papers read would be considered horrible. Most people did did good jobs while others did fantastic and semi-okay jobs. The flaws of papers that were consistently pointed out would be that the transitions were too attached with the quote embedment so they were hard to find. This would be a problem because now you can't really tell when they are trying to "transition" into a new topic rather that just jumping from thing to thing. Another weakness about papers was that the commentary was more plot summary. This was really annoying to me because I didn't get to hear about their opinions on what they thought it meant and I got yet another recap on this book we've been analyzing forever. Other than those two main the things, most of the papers were pretty decent. Our class was somewhat brutal when it came to negative things about the paper. People were pointing out things as small as the page number should lye by itself such as (98) not (p.98). To me those types of things don't matter as long as the quality of writing is up to par. So overall I would  say transitions and commentary were some of the most frequent problems in the papers read. 

My paragraph, I thought was not bad. I mean obviously it has lots of flaws but I felt I got "hated on", if you will, when my negative critique's came around. The issue's in my paper were mainly transitions. My transitions flowed too much into my quote embedment and were hard to find. I definitely will make sure that they are clear next time so that the viewers can understand the point I am trying to make. Reading over the checklist multiple times is a for sure thing to do when writing my next paper. I know fully understand how helpful it will be the next time around.

Extra Credit "Writing about Writing"

Looking at the title you might ask yourself if I'm only posting this for extra credit. Of course not, its for you guys....

One of my favorite pieces of writing that I have done myself has to definitely be my "whale wars" paper (catchy title? yeah I know). Writing this paper took about a week or so in the computer lab with Mr. Haefer's class in 7th grade. A rough idea of the topic was if you agree that these Indian people can kill whales or not (for no reason of course). Some key arguments on the side that they should be able to were "It's their tradition so why not?" and I believe it was Dan Mongovin (in our class!) who said "They are just a waste of space in the ocean" (personally I thought this was hilarious and mean at the same time.) Anyway, my side (who did not want the whales killed) was very small and consisted of about 5 people out of a class of 30 or so. So we worked on this paper and made rough drafts, edits, redo's and finally turned it in. 

Everyone in my group got pretty decent grades, mostly A's. We were not finished though. Now we had to decide who's paper was the best out of our group and read it to the class. The other group also chose their best paper in their group to read to the class. I was chosen! I was somewhat confident on reading aloud because I worked really hard on this paper. It's something I enjoyed writing about because it was my own opinion. The only thing I remember specifically was my ending sentence which was something like "The Indians stopped hunting whales before due to population decrease, so why can't they do it again?" I thought I was so clever for writing that. I was like "Oh yeah, this last sentence is just going to blow up right in there faces." Anyway, I was pretty proud of it because I felt like it was my own and I put a lot of time into it.

I also added a picture of a whale at the top and printed in blue ink to go with the whole whale theme. (Impressive? I think so.) I might still have the paper saved in my documents so if for some odd reason you want to read it, that can be arranged. Not that anyone would actually want to.

Hopefully you enjoyed!