final post

Final blog sounds like a pretty good way to start off my final blog post. Yesterday was our last day of class. Where we continued to work on work shopping our poems. Over all I found It nice to have someone else tell me what they though of my poems. I think it really made me go back and look at what I wrote and see if the mentioned suggestion would work. And most of the time it always would. Can’t believe the year is over and I don’t have to wake up on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8 am anymore for poetry class. The years keep going by faster and faster. I have enjoyed this poetry class, I found it much more fun to write poems and experiment with different words than some of my other classes. Can’t say I will miss writing a blog post each week though, I am not the biggest fan. I will miss the short creative writing we sometimes did. I found that pretty interesting and helpful when writing pretty much anything. But I guess I could just do that on my own time.

Final Blog

Tomorrow will be the final day of techniques of poetry. It is unreal to think the semester has flown by this quickly. In the duration of this semester I have not only seen my work improve, but see work of others improve as well. We have taken very simple ideas and conveyed them in ways that is more enjoyable to the audience as well as stretched the limits of the imagination through vivid language and descriptions. For me personally I know that using concrete images and vivid language has enhanced my writing and made it more effective of conveying a message.
In starting to work on my final project I have noticed through simple habits created over the semester that I have already revised many of my poems and in the portfolio I am able to show more than just one revision and progression of my pieces. I am very excited in finishing my portfolio for I am seeing the progression of my work and recognizing how far my revisions have come since the beginning of the semester.
I look forward to the final workshop tomorrow (hopefully there will be more people than Tuesday), and I think workshop is a great way to end the semester and another opportunity to get feedback for potential revisions for the portfolio.

final blog

As others before me have mentioned, it is quite weird to think that summer is so fast approaching. Overall, I feel like I have really benefited from this course, because it is a topic that I had never really looked into before. Coming from such little poetry experience has allowed me to see how much I have truly progressed over the semester. I understand the importance of word choice and the idea that sometimes less is more. I used to try to use multiple descriptive adjectives to describe nouns, but I now realize that it is important to chose a precise noun in the first place.
I have started to work on our final project and am finding it difficult to completely re-structure some of my works. Some of the pieces I feel are fine how they are and I am scared to re-vise, as I don't want the revisions to make the poem worse in anyway. I think in order to complete the assignment I must therefore look at my poetry from more of an outsider's perspective, because at this point I am too attached to my own ideas. I think the workshop days will teach me how to view my poetry from an outsider's perspective.
I'd like to wish everyone good luck on their upcoming finals and a wonderful summer!

Final Blog

I can't believe that I am about to be finishing sophomore year, I still feel so new to this school, at least from an academic standpoint. Yes, I have become comfortable with my surroundings but when I think about being an English major it still somewhat shocks me. I'm really happy with choice because I have found that I really like to write, especially creatively, and I know that my writing has become much better due to taking this poetry class. I thought at first that I would just be taking this to help fill out a major credit and it really would not be as helpful as it has become. Taking poetry helped me become so much more decisive with my words and also really aided me in noticing how to make every word count in a piece. Creativity is what poetry is all about, so I cannot beleive that I would not have helped me with my non-fiction writing, and possibley fiction writing in the future.
Techniques of poetry was a lot of fun for me, and although it may have been hard to tell at 8:30 in the morning, I was always happy class never dragged on. We always had different activities to explore varying types of poetry and it kept the class upbeat and interesting. When Christian Bok came in, he was like no poet I had ever thought about before. I do not know too many poets besides some historic greats but he defintely made an impact on me and how I think about writing in general. Vivid images have become easier for me, at least I think so, and I know that will be useful down the road. I definitely will look to do poetry in the future and who knows where it might take me.

Final Blog Post of the Year - Kurt Malkames

So we have finally reached the last week of the school year. Kind of strange to be talking about summer when there is snow outside – but I guess that is just Canton, NY. Overall I have to say I really enjoyed this class. My writing has definitely improved and I began to enjoy something I never thought possible. This last week has been great so far with more workshopping and I think that all of the poems that people presented this week have been very high quality. Looking forward to the chapbook and Ars Poetica, I think this will be an interesting assignment. Revising my work will be harder than it seems. To really edit it well will take some time – and some of the poems may even have to be restructured. In terms of the class as a whole I would give it very high marks and recommend it to a friend without reservation. The poems that were assigned were very useful as models for what the assignment was for that week. Despite the fact that there were no formal exams I believe I was able to learn more in this class than some of my others this semester – which had weekly quizzes and exams every three weeks. Poetry is a skill that I hope to keep for the rest of my life – weather it is something I do seriously or not I don’t know, but I think it is a fun thing to practice every now and then.

End of the semester already?! Wow. It didn't seem that long ago since we started. And I'm going to be graduating. AHHHHHHHHH! Got to get a job,go to grad school all that fun stuff. Anyway I really liked Tuesday's class. It helped give me a clearer picture of what to do in ars poetica and also gave me ideas about what to write about next. The exercise that had us write in a concrete style and then abstract was especially helpful.

Our Final Workshop

Repeating the sentiments of everyone else, I too am surprised that the end of our semester is nearing. How is it possible that we only have one week of classes left? The real question is, however, should I be cynical about the pace of time, or is it something irrelevant? In essence, how much time do we waste with time? I heard (in a recent presentation) that indigenous tribes in Africa do not measure time, or age for that matter.
I enjoyed my workshop poems, mainly due to the preparation I made in advance. Since it is poetry month, I have been writing a poem a day, and the habitual practice of writing opens a wider channel for ideas. When it comes to an assignment, I already have several ideas incubating, and the difficult choice is to choose which to develop. Just as a teaser, I wrote a slam poem and a call/response (echo?) piece that is separated by several thousand years. Specifically, their are two voices in one poem, albeit a bit different from the hemistich we constructed in class.
Ars poetica will be a challenge, for I find it difficult to separate genuine thoughts from the lessons we have gleaned from class. It is my goal to introduce original "qualities" of poetry, rather than restate what we have affirmed in class.