Making Words Come Alive

 Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings. - W.H. Auden

Welcome to my first learning post. 

In elementary school, a teacher taught us how to write identity haikus. I thought, 'This is kind of weird. How can I explain myself in so few words?' She'd explained the rules of haikus in detail, and I was lost even further. 'Now, I have to count the syllables and use nature in it too?' My teacher showed us a haiku she had written for herself, and I could not grasp how much of her identity she expressed in it until now. Her haiku included mostly images of the sun. 

In high school, I enrolled in the Advanced Placement for English Language Arts-- a decision I am grateful I made. My teacher was the type students were scared of because her philosophies were strong, and she had strict teaching habits that made some students cry. On the first day, she prompted us to write diamante poems, about opposite topics composed of seven lines in the shape of a diamond. If you guessed that the diamante poem is about identity, I reward you with a hundred points. She asked us to pick two qualities we had and link them together in the poem. This was my first time hearing about a diamante poem and the existence of other forms of poetry besides haikus. In my four years of high school, I worked with Italian and Shakespearean sonnets, limericks, and a lot more poetry forms. Slowly but surely, I gained an understanding of how poetry is another form of writing with its rules but also with its peculiarity. 

One of my "Notes"

I am not well-versed in writing poetry despite years of studying it in school. In anything you learn, I think there's a difference between studying the lesson and applying the lesson yourself in the world. I have always been a person who sought the 'Notes' app on the phone whenever I had something to unleash. When I felt like crying or when I was frustrated about liking someone, I wrote everything down. It was my digital diary. I also attempted to write fiction, but I had no patience for it, and my imagination was spent. 

For my learning project in EDTC 300, I will be studying different forms of poetry each week and writing a poem in that form to produce a final poetry book at the end of the course. Along with each poem will be a long caption explaining the meaning of my poems. For the most part, the process is simple: draw a poetry form from a cup, research it, annotate examples, write my own poem, and then finally, add it to the book. I think this poetry book is something useful I could add to my future classroom. 

Here are some inspirations I had for this learning project: