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

[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.