April 23rd

I really liked John Ashberry's poem, Paradoxes and Oxymorons. When I first read the title I thought it'd be a fun poem to read because paradoxes and oxymorons are fun in and of themselves whenever you come across one. I liked how this poem is not difficult to understand; and picking out the actual paradoxes and oxymorons is fun. For example, the first paradox I noticed was "You have it, but you don't have it" on the third line. One of the more interesting oxymorons was "A deeper outside thing, at the beginning of the third stanza. Ashberry was very talented to be able to combine both oxymorons and paradoxes together in one poem line after line and still have the poem flow and make sense. I find it ironic that he uses this rhetoric literary tools in order to create a poem...A lot of stuff you learn in one year of English class all tied into one.

I also liked Langston Hughe's poem, Theme for English B. As I am taking a Civil Rights course at the same time as this class, I liked coming across this poem which had to do a little bit with black struggle, as well as the poem we read a few weeks ago, about the wife who's husband lynched that young black boy. I think anyone can relate to this poem. Heck, everyone in this class should be able to...Our open ended assignments sometimes makes all of us wonder what we are supposed to be writing about. When you first hear an instructors directions, the task at hand may seem simple, yet when you actually attempt to complete the assignment, you begin to think whether or not it is at simple as you projected it to be, and then the task of writing the poem becomes a little more difficult. The young man's struggle in this poem however, has to do with the fact that not only does he wish to do well on this assignment that he does not think is that simple, but he also struggles with the issue of being African American. He writes about how race affects his writing, because of the environment he is in and what that causes him to write about. I thought it was all very interesting.