Week 3

Uni Life

University has been pretty hard for me,
Lots of new faces, little time and no money.
The change is not what I expected it to be,
My boyfriend tries to tell me "it'll be alright honey".

My grades dropped, theyv'e gotten low,
It has made grade school seem like a big joke.
I miss the friends I used to know,
And pizza Wednesdays with a large coke!

My level of stress has gotten high,
Between all of these assignments and written tests,
I wish this semester would just fly by,
Please MUN just give it a rest!

Maybe if there was more time in a day,
All these troubles I would not have to say.

I started this poem by writing the first line of each stanza and figuring out what to rhyme each line with. I knew the direction of the poem once I finished the first 3 lines 'a,b,a'. I didn't really use much poetic language in the poem, I just focused on trying to get the poem to rhyme correctly. I tried to fit in a form of poetic langauge by using imagery. For example I used auditory imagery when I wrote 'my boyfriend tries to tell me "it'll be alright honey".'

Week 2, Friday

'We Real Cool' Gwendolyn Brooks 

This poem contains 4 stanzas with 2 lines each, every line ends with the word 'we' excluding the last line. Every sentence in the poem starts at the end of the line. Gwendolyn uses poetic language such as alliteration; "Lurke late" and "Strike straight" are both clear examples. 'We Real Cool' is a poem describing the lives of a group of friends. Most likely these friends are into trouble since it says things like "We Lurke late" and "We Left school". The poem ends with the phrase "We Die soon." This phrase relates to context and form. It is the only line that doesn't end in we, which shows we are at the end of the poem. At the same time the phrase could mean that the group of friends get into so much trouble that they realize the won't live much longer.

'landscape: 1.' bp Nichols

Nichols created this poem with no punctuation, not even spaces. The poem is one line long and underlined. The poem has just one phrase, it says 'alongthehorizongrewanunbrokenlineoftrees'. The content relates to the form because each letter represents a tree on the horizon (the underline) and since there is no spaces in the poem, the trees are in an unbroken line.

Week 1, Friday

Song choice: Ed Sheeran - The A Team

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0dnp5E8FMo

 The song "The A Team", written by Ed Sheeran, has many forms of poetic language including figurative language. One example from the song where figurative language is used is when Sheeran says "Slowly sinking, wasting, Crumbling like pastries", in which Sheeran is comparing the woman's face in the song to a pastry because of the way they crumble using a simile and visual imagery. Obviously the woman's face is not crumbling but it is in fact slowly wasting away due to the life she has and what she puts herself through. The simile helps the listener visualize the woman's face wasting away. Another form of poetic language used in the song is metaphor. For example, when Sheeran says "and sells love to another man." In reality the emotion of love of is not something you can just "sell", it is something within us, but the way Sheeran uses it in this song is to show to listener that the woman in the song is a prostitute who in fact sells her body for money and not actually her love. 

The song is written with 5 stanza's and is un-rhyming. There is no periods throughout the song until the end. Sheeran does this to intertwine the form with the context of the song because over the course of the song he uses the phrase 'angels fly' quite a few times but then the song ends with 'angels to die'. This symbolizes the death of the unfortunate woman as well as the end of the song.

Week 1, Wednesday

In my opinion the most appealing critical approach McMahan explains is the formalist approach. Although all of the others are important, formalism appeals to me the most because I feel it is the most clear and concise critical approach that McMahan explains. I liked this approach the most because I usually take this approach when reading such as poems, stories, etc. I feel that all the other approaches McMahan explains are focused on one topic only while formalism covers everything. For example, the historical approach only focuses on the history of the poem and looking at the piece of literature as the original audience would have. Unlike the historical approach, formalism deals with the poem as a whole. Formalism deals with trying to connect all the separate features in the piece of literature.

The poem I chose to analyse with formalism is: 'Blues' bp Nichol 

This poem is a free verse. Nichol uses no punctuation and just 4 letters to make up the entire poem: l,o,v and e. If you read the poem from the bottom up you will realise it is the same as reading the poem from the beginning. The poem is in the shape of a crossword puzzle and if you look at different angles, love is always the answer.