I should be doing homework.

[godream]

So we're currently in the middle of the poetry unit of Creative Writing, which is turning out to be much less writing and much more reading. I don't have a problem with this, much, in and of itself. I love poetry, reading it as well as creating it, and some of the stuff the teacher has selected really appeals to me. We talked about Sylvia Plath's "Nick and the Candlestick", which I liked a lot. But why are we doing this -- and only this* -- in a creative writing class? She says because not everyone can write poetry.

Aargh.

Not true, dammit. Not everyone cares to put in the effort to write poetry, not everyone wants to try to channel their thoughts into that vein, not everyone thinks that way out of instinct, but IMHO, especially given the incredible range of possibilities of the form, anyone is capable of it. So what if it's hard? I think writing short stories is hard; it takes effort to come up with a plot and pace it in a halfway-decent manner. I'm sure somewhere out there there's someone who thinks writing journal entries is difficult, that there's a thousand easier ways to express your thoughts. And that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Yeah, poetry can be hard, but that's part of what makes it rewarding, to write or to read. Get over it.

That said, I now have to go write the many prose assignments, having not yet "gotten over it" and figured them out. :P Not that this has *anything* to do with why I'm feeling a bit down about the class.

* Okay, we did one exercise involving cutting out all the 'unnecessary' words from a piece of prose and calling it an ode. Doesn't count.

Comments

[faerie16.livejournal.com]

Your starred item, we did that with Ms. McGee in 8th grade. I don't think that counts as poetry, though. I bought The Bell Jar on Saturday with my 20% discount at Borders. Yay for discounts! I just with I had time to read it. I also have to finish Ella Enchanted. I love writing poetry, especially my last one. Except, my last poem with pictures scared a lot of people. Damn!

[godream.livejournal.com]

I think part of the "scared a lot of people" thing is that I don't see you that often; I think most of the people reading your journal don't; and we've got only the entries to go by. So there's a mild panic and a desire for explanation when I see you're having a rough time, and so, um, yeah. Totally not criticizing -- it's definitely healthy to have an outlet -- just explaining a bit.

Yeah, I don't think it's much poetry either. I mean, yes, poetry can be about cutting out what's not needed and getting straight to the heart of the matter, but you can't say "okay, every occurance of a preposition is unnecessary" -- because it's all about the context, sometimes it can be the concrete nouns that can be discarded and that's definitely not what we were doing in class. Blargh.

Hey, summer's coming, you'll get time to read, right? :)

[faerie16.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I just tend to keep my emotions inside. Then when I need to let it all out, it comes out. That's one thing I try not to let people know about me. Kim was like, "You're always unhappy, Dana". The fact is that most of the time in my journal entries I am really happy. I am hard to explain, but so are a lot of teenagers. Yes, summer is coming, and then I'll have plenty of time to read. When is your graduation? I'd love to come if you don't mind.

[godream.livejournal.com]

I'd love to have you at graduation, though I'm a little nervous there may be issues of tickets or whatnot. I'll figure it out. Graduation is May 28th. Hurrah for summer!

Part of the always unhappy thing -- which I sometimes see in myself when I look back at old entries -- is that you don't need that outlet as much when you're feeling happy. You know? When you're feeling down and need to vent you're more likely to post -- er, and by you I mean me, I don't know about you. *shrugs* LJ entries present a biased version of life -- it's not a bad thing, it's just a thing. YMMV.

[faerie16.livejournal.com]

YAY! ALISON'S GOING TO MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY!!!!!!!!!

[minttown1.livejournal.com]

At least your school offers a creative writing class. ;)

[godream.livejournal.com]

Good point. And I *am* glad that we're getting to poetry at all. I just enjoy whining. :)

[shaktool.livejournal.com]

Yep, my Creative Writing class, with Mrs. Notaro, is also doing a poetry unit that doesn't involve writing poetry. Actually, we can still write poetry if we choose to, though. We have only one more assignment for the rest of the year, and that is to come up with 15-20 pages of whatever by the end. Whatever is not limited to prose... or to poetry... it can include title pages, dedication pages, pictures, bibliographies... and you can use whatever font size you want, and you can leave plenty of white space on a page if you write a short poem. And kids were still complaining that it was too much work. Kids are all like, "I just can't write, I try to type but nothing comes out," etc. :P

There are times when I'm proud to be a slacker, and times when I try not to associate myself with them...

[godream.livejournal.com]

Aw, that's no fair. We've got both page and word counts to hit for *our* final. When I turned in a couple drafts of poems for peer review the other day, the immediate class response was "does this count as a page?" I have Ms. Wong, and she said that the word count was the thing to pay attention to. Which rather annoys me, especially in light of the unnecessary-word-deletion exercise which would appear to make poetry merely much-concentrated prose...

I think I lost track of my point here somewhere. It was probably that I'm glad to hear the pain here is shared, or something.