Assignment 9

I have to say, I really enjoyed reading everyone's poem for this weeks workshop. It was really interesting to see the different ways that everyone interpreted the same assignment. I really liked Taylor's a lot, and I thought it was impressive that he would choose to write from the point of view of someone from another gender. I think that would be a little too challenging for me at this point, but I thought he did it successfully. It was interesting to see that some people choose real life memories, and then wrote from someone else point of view. I think this also would have been an interesting challenge, because you would really have to remove yourself from the event. I found it easy to write from someone's point of view that was removed from me, but i think I would have found this assignment even more challenging if i had attempted to write it from the point of view of a memory or event where I was also present, it would be a lot harder to leave yourself outside the poem. I really enjoyed doing this assignment over all. I felt like it answered a lot of the questions we have been thinking about all semester as we read professional poets work. For me, it gave me a little more insight on how Cathy Park Hong could create a voice and character so unique and different from her own, yet also so convincing. It also reminded me of the poem about the girl from the spelling bee, that was actually written by a man. I think it shows that it is an important part of being a poet, to be able to remove yourself from your work a little bit. I guess in a way it prevents you from limiting yourself to only what you know, you just have to learn how to feel what other people experience in their lives and translate it into poetry. I think this goes along with the depersonalization that we were debating in class last week, with the Stein and Eliot essays. I think that after everything we covered this year, that is one of the most interesting questions we have discussed.