A Poem A Day…

Whether you like it or not, poetry is a part of English. The fancy language, the clever use of literary devices, its all a part of developing your writing. Count yourself lucky, back in the day not only did people write like this, they spoke like it too! I’ve never disliked poetry, even the first time I learned about it as a kid I enjoyed it. The only thing that is hard for me with poems is starting. It might take me half an hour just thinking up my first line. However I recently realized that this worked for me. It’s a good thing I make sure I have a strong opening line because when I get writing there is no stopping me. I just write down whatever pops in to my head surrounding that first line. That made me think, how do other people write?…

Unlike most people the idea of starting a poetry unit lit a fire under my butt. Finally, something I know I’m strong at that I can put my mind too. Getting going was a little slow, basic simile poems with AA, BB rhyming schemes aren’t exactly my cup of tea. Now I think of it though, they used to be. They used to be my favourite types of poems to write. Only as we started this unit I took a step back and noticed that I was writing stronger poems when they didn’t have to rhyme.

Anyways, back to the poetry unit. The first poem was kind of hard, I was trying too hard and was expecting too much of myself so it went pretty slow. It turned out fine though, so I was relatively pleased with myself. Throughout learning all these new types of poems and literary devices I developed knowledge and skills I can implement in to my everyday writing, to keep it interesting. This just goes to show why poems are very important in English.

My favourite poem that I wrote throughout this unit was definitely the last poem, the “self-portrait” poem. I just starting writing and ideas were just bouncing around in my head waiting to be put on the page. I got so deep and I really impressed myself to be quite honest. The most surprising thing about that poem was that it had to be 25-30 lines long, much longer than any other poem we were assigned, and I completed it quicker than most of those poems. I guess I just really had a lot to say about myself…

For our final assignment we had to create a book featuring all of our poems. We used the app Book Creator to make these books, and can I just say that it’s a great app. It’s so simple and easy to use. I’ve never had an issue with it yet and I hope it stays that way. Anyways, this wasn’t a huuuuuge task as we already had the poems ready, we just needed to review them and make sure they looked nice. The overall look of the book was mostly up to us but there were a few things you needed to have. I enjoyed making this book because it reminded me of the Oregon book I created using the same app, which I had a really great experience with. To make my book more creative and interesting I added videos that corresponded to the topic of the poem. Also, one of the main things we had to add was an assignment we did a few months ago, our “Worldview Explain Everything‘s”, so that’s another reason you should definitely click the link at the bottom of this page.

All in all this was a pretty good unit. Sure we had poems every day, sure it was stressful racking your brain for ideas, and yes it was annoying having to redo your poems, but in the end I think everyone’s literature skills improved.