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May. 3rd, 2007 12:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethDid college again.
Only two more lessons left.
Yaays.
I think I quite like taking the close reading toolkit to old poems. Ones with rhythm and metre and rhyme schemes, and a structure I can see and figure out. Newer poems are kind of... blobby. And the ones we've been looking at lately about madness and death... the whole point of them, the choppy sentence structure and the weird run on lines that cross stanza divides and the tiny stanzas and the irregular line lengths and having no rhyme, that's all to create confusion and make them look mad.
I've had quite enough of mad. Plenty. More than plenty.
And while I can see that poems that don't rhyme or go diDum diDum are in fact poems, they seem to me to be ignoring the fun stuff, and possibly kind of lazy.
*nods*
... no, okay, you can get a lot of effects out of the variety of forms, mixing up rhythms and all that. I can see that. I just... I don't *like* it much.
Today we studied poems that had a fixed rhyme scheme and nice big stanzas and a complicated but repeating meter and all sorts of lovely stuff like that.
And teach didn't say anything about any of it. It was all about the lexis, semantic field, themes, preoccupations, and a side order of feminism (the girl doesn't get to say anything ever).
But all that stuff is there in poems which don't have the skeleton. With the skeleton, what the effect? Well I have to figure it myself because nothing said on it.
I sulk.
I think mostly I don't like poems, cause they're just kind of little, and don't seem like very much, and okay they want you to do work and unpack it, but then I'm the one making them mean stuff.
And they never mean the same thing when I unpack them as when everyone else is talking.
And if we're told that all the poems are about sex and religion and science and tensions between the three then people go off and find out how that's true then that's a different sort of a thing to just looking at the poem and figuring what it seems to be about. I mean I didn't see religion. Plenty of sex. Not a lot of science. Quite a lot of politics, maybe, since he proclaimed himself the boss of everything by the end. But I don't think I see how it's religion-and-science even after they all talked about it, so I have decided that's because it isn't.
*nods*
... and, possibly, because I don't have a whole ton of background reading appropriate to the era.
It's like without the reading about Seamus Heaney context Northern Ireland stuff everyone was reading Punishment like it was a slavery and feminism thing, and once they've read all the context handed to them then of course it's about Northern Ireland, and... if you have to read the context to get that then it's not proper.
... Except it's like fanfic where they assume you've read the canon texts already. Assume shared background, tell story within it.
So I get that, I just get *frustrated* with that.
A lot of poems seem to need you to have read the canon first. Or at least need that if you are to get the same stuff out of it as the teacher.
I think getting other stuff out of it is perfectly reasonable as long as you can point at the parts and use the keywords to explain it.
It just makes me feel in class like I'm sideways to everyone.
Sulk.
Okay, I go eat and sleep and unsulk.
... I have no not-milk and no cakelike. Blah. Will have to eat actual protein type meal.
Only two more lessons left.
Yaays.
I think I quite like taking the close reading toolkit to old poems. Ones with rhythm and metre and rhyme schemes, and a structure I can see and figure out. Newer poems are kind of... blobby. And the ones we've been looking at lately about madness and death... the whole point of them, the choppy sentence structure and the weird run on lines that cross stanza divides and the tiny stanzas and the irregular line lengths and having no rhyme, that's all to create confusion and make them look mad.
I've had quite enough of mad. Plenty. More than plenty.
And while I can see that poems that don't rhyme or go diDum diDum are in fact poems, they seem to me to be ignoring the fun stuff, and possibly kind of lazy.
*nods*
... no, okay, you can get a lot of effects out of the variety of forms, mixing up rhythms and all that. I can see that. I just... I don't *like* it much.
Today we studied poems that had a fixed rhyme scheme and nice big stanzas and a complicated but repeating meter and all sorts of lovely stuff like that.
And teach didn't say anything about any of it. It was all about the lexis, semantic field, themes, preoccupations, and a side order of feminism (the girl doesn't get to say anything ever).
But all that stuff is there in poems which don't have the skeleton. With the skeleton, what the effect? Well I have to figure it myself because nothing said on it.
I sulk.
I think mostly I don't like poems, cause they're just kind of little, and don't seem like very much, and okay they want you to do work and unpack it, but then I'm the one making them mean stuff.
And they never mean the same thing when I unpack them as when everyone else is talking.
And if we're told that all the poems are about sex and religion and science and tensions between the three then people go off and find out how that's true then that's a different sort of a thing to just looking at the poem and figuring what it seems to be about. I mean I didn't see religion. Plenty of sex. Not a lot of science. Quite a lot of politics, maybe, since he proclaimed himself the boss of everything by the end. But I don't think I see how it's religion-and-science even after they all talked about it, so I have decided that's because it isn't.
*nods*
... and, possibly, because I don't have a whole ton of background reading appropriate to the era.
It's like without the reading about Seamus Heaney context Northern Ireland stuff everyone was reading Punishment like it was a slavery and feminism thing, and once they've read all the context handed to them then of course it's about Northern Ireland, and... if you have to read the context to get that then it's not proper.
... Except it's like fanfic where they assume you've read the canon texts already. Assume shared background, tell story within it.
So I get that, I just get *frustrated* with that.
A lot of poems seem to need you to have read the canon first. Or at least need that if you are to get the same stuff out of it as the teacher.
I think getting other stuff out of it is perfectly reasonable as long as you can point at the parts and use the keywords to explain it.
It just makes me feel in class like I'm sideways to everyone.
Sulk.
Okay, I go eat and sleep and unsulk.
... I have no not-milk and no cakelike. Blah. Will have to eat actual protein type meal.