Who are we? What do we want to express? How can we show that?
This poetry unit was centered around self expression and methods to help us convey our thoughts to the audience. Whether it was through discussion of author’s intent to reading our memories out loud. Through reading, writing, and listening to poems, we got to feel the all emotions of the poets. The joy of going to a basketball game, the grief of losing someone, every heartbreak. Poetry is powerful in that it helps people connect.
Dramatic Reading – “Ants” from Poet X
TIEA – Compare and Contrast
Poem Performance
Poem Annotation – “For Teenage Girls With Wild Ambition and Trembling Hearts” by Clementine von Radics
Poetry is a lot of things. For some, it’s a way of expressing themselves. It’s storytelling without all the unnecessary words. It can mean anything you want it to mean. It’s complicated but so simple. That’s the beauty of poetry.
For every person that reads those words, it takes on different meaning and form that is unique to each individual. People can spend hours analyzing and annotating a single poem and still never know what exactly the author is trying to tell the readers. Or maybe the author’s intent was right in front of our faces the whole time and we just overcomplicated the entire theme of the poem. Maybe the author meant for the readers to decide the meaning of the poem for themselves. Who knows? It’s poetry. Use the words to find yourself, then maybe other people can find you.
Two Poem Annotation:
Pleasures of Ordinary Life Annotation:
Phenomenal Woman Annotation:
Two TIEA Paragraphs:
Pleasures of Ordinary Life TIEA:
In Pleasures of Ordinary Life, Judith Viorst uses first person point of view/perspective to inspire readers to learn how to find happiness in the small and ordinary things.Viorst draws from her own personal experiences and failures in life that have led her to being content in a life that’s not as she envisioned by saying,
It seems the woman I’ve turned out to be
Is not the heorine of some grand story.
But happiness arrived in new disguises:
Sun lighting a child’s hair. A friend’s embrace. (14-15, 9-10).
Viorst chooses to use words like “I’ve” in order to be able to talk about her own personal experiences which allow her to establish trust with the reader. Since Viorst is using first person perspective to discuss the dreams she had that didn’t come true,the readers feel like the author can relate to the sadness that comes along with realising they didn’t become who they wanted to be. After she has established trust with the readers that she understands their disappointment with themselves, she changes the topic and in line 9-10, instills motivation by discussing how she gradually found happiness in simple things like a sun lighting a child’s hair or just a friend’s hug. She is able to inspire readers to find happiness in their own lives because by discussing her own broken dreams, the readers feel as if she’s been in their position before and if she has been able to be content in her life as it is now, then the readers can also be like her and be happy in the small things. She gives them hope that failure or not succeeding doesn’t mean they can’t be happy.
Viorst, Judith. “Pleasures of Ordinary Life,” Poem Hunter. 3, January, 2003. Wed. 19 April, 2018.
Phenomenal Woman TIEA:
In Phenomenal Woman, Maya Angelou uses imagery to empower women to feel proud of themselves and feel comfortable in their own skin, no matter what they look like.Angelou talks about how although she doesn’t have the physical attributes that people would label as pretty, men and women find themselves being drawn into the aura her attributes give off, saying
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman.
Phenomenally. (22-23, 25-27).
Angelou is first able to draw the reader’s attention to her running list of physical features because the detailed description of each trait makes the readers give more thought to the meaning of each line. However Angelou uses imagery in an interesting way that gives each trait a deeper meaning than just being a detailed description, she uses imagery to empower women. In the first line of evidence, the author of course does not literally mean she has fire in her eyes, but wants to bring out the amount of passion and fight that she has sand needs to have in order to fight against the prejudice she faces from being a woman. The second line is talking about the brightness and confidence that emits from the radiance of her smile. When she looks at you, because of the confidence in her smile, she brightens up the room like a flash of light. When you read the third line, you are able to feel the aura that she gives off when she dances. Since Angelou uses descriptive words like ‘joy in my feet,’ the readers know immediately that she looks happy when she dances and she’s able to influence people around her to also share her excitement when they see her dance. Angelou is telling people through the depth of her imagery that it’s not the physical features themselves that make her attractive, but the way her confidence and self-love seeps through her features and makes them attractive. It’s not her eyes that are attractive, but the passion in her eyes.
In Pleasures of Ordinary Life by Judith Viorst and Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou, both authors use first person point of view to inspire their audiences to feel a certain way. Viorst and Angelou both mention their past experiences with feeling like failure and learning to embrace what it means to be a woman in order to build a level of trust with the readers before talking about how they’ve moved on or realised the true meaning of beauty.
But I have learned to find the poetry
In what my hands can touch, my eyes can see. (Viorst, line 16-17).
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery. (Angelou, line 33-34).
In the first 2 lines Viorst starts to talk about how she has overcome her feelings of being a failure and has gradually learned to find the poetry. She’s using poetry as a metaphor for happiness, because often times, like happiness, it’s a lot harder to write poetry when you’re forcing yourself to write. It’s the same with happiness, a lot harder to find when you are forcing yourself to be happy or find happiness. Instead, Viorst is saying in the second line that she has learned how to let the words and the poem come naturally to her. She no longer racks her brain to force words out onto paper, but feels the poetry in the moment. If she sees something she feels overcome with motivational to write about, then she will write because it’s something she wants to do. It’s her way of saying she will feel happiness in the moment instead of trying to fake her joy. The author uses first person perspective throughout the 2 lines, which ties the concept of being happy to her poetry. This is done well by using first person point of view as she talks about poetry, but then as she talks about feeling inspired to write, the subject becomes more vague, switching to talk about both poetry and happiness while keeping the first person point perspective. The audience sees how she was inspired by poetry to not force herself to feel upbeat and are also inspired to be content in whatever they feel, whether it’s sad, joyful, anger, or any other emotion. The and 2nd author, Angelou, also uses first person point of view to inspire woman to focus on more than just looks using her own experiences. The 3rd and 4th lines are referring to how people wonder how she is beautiful without having the standard beauty ideals. Angelou tries to get the point across to the readers that her “inner mystery” or what makes her special is not on the outside, but on the inside. Since so many people have wanted to tear down her self esteem by saying she’s not physically pretty or has features that fit the normalised idea of pretty, she wants the readers to know she is not phased by what they comment about her her appearance because they can’t touch her soul, and that’s what makes her pretty, but above all, it’s what makes her phenomenal. Readers are inspired by her poem because she uses her personal experience to empower women to embrace their inner beauty.
Contrast:
In the poem Pleasures of Ordinary Life by Judith Viorst and Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou, the authors use poetic devices such as rhyming and repetition differently in order to serve different intents. In Pleasures of Ordinary Life, Viorst uses a clear cut rhyme scheme of ABABB throughout the entirety of the poem to tie in the idea of pursuing a content fulfilled life through all stanzas.
It’s time to make things good, not just make do.
It’s time to stop complaining and pursue (Viorst, line 4-5).
Since she keeps going back to this idea of wanting to pursue a life where she’s content in the ordinary, the best way to help the readers remember and take note of this concept is to bring it up over and over again. However, she achieves this not by using repetition, but by Rhyming helps the readers to remember the poem better because it gives the poem a beat that makes the poem easy to read. Viorst takes advantage of the recurrence of sounds that occur in rhyming to present a recurrence of the same ideas because the music of rhyme helps readers to remember. rhyming instead. Then using rhyme, she continuously talks about getting herself out of the funk, in the poem, and talks about it twice already in the evidence. In Phenomenal Woman, Angelou uses repetition along with rhyme in order to get the readers to take note of the big idea, so she repeats the same rhyme over and over throughout the poem saying,
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal Woman,
That’s me. (Angelou, line 11-13).
The idea of being unapologetically a woman is repeated through the whole poem, but the part that readers pay attention to is the rhyme that is repeated in each stanza. Angelou takes a different approach from Viorst and instead of changing the rhyme constantly, she uses the same repeated rhyme to help her emphasise the point that she is an unbelievable woman. Through rhyming, the author is able to create a pattern that she repeats in order to create meaning. It is because repetition creates a sense of hope for the readers in this poem, that Angelou continues to use the same rhyme. The readers are bombarded with the recurrence of these lines, especially the word “phenomenal”, which leads them to feel as if maybe the author wants them to remember she is phenomenal/women are phenomenal. Angelou stresses the idea that women are not just unique and amazing, but they are so much more powerful than that, they are phenomenal.
Inspirational Poem – All I Hear:
They laugh and say
“We’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with you.”
But it feels like they’re just trying to downplay,
In a way,
The judgement behind those words.
I scoff and pretend I’m not the same, but
Am I like them?
Every word that comes out of her lips, clouded by the faint sound of her foreign accent.
Her words hold the weight of the world,
The finality in leaving,
The pain of starting over,
But all I hear is broken English.
Am I like them?
How dare I be ashamed when she was the bridge between two cultures,
And her words were like the stories of the travelers who crossed the bridge.
Stories I never heard.
Words I never bothered to listen to.
Am I like them?
She could’ve spoken in every other language,
She could’ve told me everything.
But I preferred the deafening silence.
I am like them.
I don’t want to be.
I won’t be.
Inspirational Poem Slideshow:
Hope Imagery Flipgrid:
Hope Imagery Poem – Hope Makes Us Believe:
My hope feels like the soft red cloth that wraps your neck like a cape.
My hope tastes like the endless boxes of cereal kids go through in their relentless search for that one toy.
My hope looks like the thousands of people, young and old, all marching for their rights.
My hope smells like the disinfectant of hospitals as parents wait an eternity for their comatose child to wake.
My hope sounds like the rhythmic pattern of feet against pavement long after practice has ended.
My hope is for people to hold onto their hopefulness (because it’s the only reason they try).
