This Week (5/22)

This week in creative writing, we turned in our first two poems, read City of Eclogue and also graded others' poems.

The poems which I decided to turn in were "Stay Away, My Rest" and "A Diseased Poem." "Stay Away, My Rest" is a poem about how sleep can act as a detriment to some people, yet the lack of rest can also be a major problem. If you sleep, you are wasting precious hours of your days. If you stay awake, you will start to slip away from reality, sometimes too far. "A Diseased Poem" is really more about how infectious thoughts really can be. If let alone for too long, they can grow wild and do just about anything. The poem is supposed to act as a being itself, as strange excerpts continue to enter themselves onto the page, eventually driving the poem to sorrow.

The book "City Eclogue" by Ed Roberson was a book full of different poems. In class, we picked apart some of these poems. The book can be quite confusing sometimes, but can also be really deep. My favorite parts of the book were the entries of "Beauty's Standing." There was a lot of anger going into different places, and many different (mostly political) issues that were raised in this section. The writer also included some insight on what to do with some of these issues.

Another part of "City Eclogue" that grabbed my attention was the way every poem was formed: with spaces thrown all about in sometimes seemingly random places. I believe that these white areas on the page were made to give an emotion to the reader. Since the blank spots are foreign to the average reader, we become somewhat confused, upset, irritated and even feel a bit of distress. The book spends most of its time describing the city, and big cities can be very irritating and stressful, so I think he did this to make us feel the tension in the streets.

It was really interesting reading others' poetry in class. Everyone else' style differs so vastly from the last. In our group, there was a girl who wrote very descriptive, very "human" poems, another who wrote scenery-like poems, a man who wrote poems about the nation and women, and then there was me, the one who writes the stuff that makes no sense. It was a breath of fresh air hearing what others' had to say instead of just listening to myself write all the time.