Assignment 0: First Blog Entry

• Currently I’m studying to become an English major. However, begin a first-year student, I’m still taking a wide variety of courses to find my interests. What I like about English is the way words can be used to display hidden meanings, (like with symbolisms and metaphors), and how you can discover a much deeper meaning behind a piece of text if you take the time to analyze it.

• I’m from Watertown, NY, which is about 70 miles from Canton. Watertown is just as cold as Canton, and tends to get even more snow. It’s a nice city of about 27,000 whose economy and population is no doubt boosted by its close location to Fort Drum.

• Aside from writing, I enjoy running and am currently on the school’s cross-country and track and field teams. In my free time I also enjoy playing the guitar, watching movies, and hanging out with friends.

• I have had pretty good experiences with getting feedback on my work so far. In high school we did very little peer reviewing, so it was a welcomed change once I got to college. Most of the time the feedback I have received not only made me aware of what I needed to fix, but also made me aware of the things I had done well. I feel that because of this, I have already become a better than when I first got here by becoming aware of how other’s read my writings.

• I don’t have too many influences, as I have not read much poetry. However, one poet whose work I do admire is Stephen Crane’s. His poems are quite thought provoking and he was not afraid to show his sometimes outlandish beliefs. They are commonly written like a short story, and even though he rarely rhymed his lines, his words always seemed to flow so perfectly.

• What’s good about good poetry is that it makes you think, or opens your mind up to a new idea. But to make the poetry “good,” the moral isn’t simply stated out in the open; the poet must make the reader become curious enough to do a little digging around and analyzing to discover the meaning.

• I hope to learn about the many different styles of poetry. Since poetry can be such a personal topic, everyone has their own way of going about it. I like that there’s no wrong or right way to write a poem, so I’m interested to learn the many abstract ways poets end up writing. I also hope to learn how to write more in-depth poems, not necessarily in relation to the length of a poem as much as to its meaning.