Week 3 Takeaways

by Cassarino

Closing thoughts on poetry, connections to music, reflections on writing your first essay, anything else…? What was your 1 most favorite poem?

9 thoughts on “Week 3 Takeaways”

  1. I really liked discussing the poem “a song in the front yard” by Gwendolyn Brooks in my small group discussion with Maya, Hannah, and Ruthie. I found the concept of “optics” quite interesting in the poem and how the idea of presenting your front yard vs. backyard functions within the poem. We discussed how privilege and class function within the poem and did a ton of line analysis. However, something I didn’t think about until we met to discuss this poem was the structure and meaning behind the simple language and how that is connected to childhood/innocence. In the future, I want to pay more attention to the construction and form of poems.

  2. I really enjoyed diving deeper into specific poems and gaining new insights from smaller conversations with my classmates. I was able to look at parts of the poems from new perspectives and this helped me with writing my essay a lot. I felt like going into my essay I had a much stronger understanding of the poem I was writing about after discussing it with my classmates which made the task of writing an essay less daunting. I also really enjoyed reading the poems everyone wrote!

  3. My favorite poem this week was “a song in the front yard” by Gwendolyn Brooks. This was the poem I emulated when writing my own and the one I discussed with Sarina, Ruthie, and Hannah. Something I’ve continued to think about is the link between female status and anonymity. Like how to be a “respectable” female, you need to “leave a little to the imagination”, be quiet, contained, and fade into the background. The women who are identifiable (and fully express their femininity) are the “bad women.”

    Overall, I’m really grateful to have a chance to explore this sort of topic in the classroom setting!

  4. Honestly, listening to Hoizer during class was the highlight of my school week. Bridging connections between poetry and everyday music I listen to was really interesting, and I felt like it was a nice reflective and calming moment. Originally my favorite poem was “The 17 Year Old & the Gay Bar” because I felt it instantly made sense to me. However, during class on Thursday, I really enjoyed talking about “If You are Over Staying Woke” with Rowan and Sierra. I felt we had a really good conversation about the poem and got a lot out of it. I would definitely like to do those small group sessions again, I certainly get a lot out of them in class.

  5. Writing this essay was very difficult for me. I had trouble organizing the ideas in my head into a well-articulated essay. I also had two other papers due this past week so I felt overwhelmed with the amount of writing I had. I’m glad I was able to crank it out because I do genuinely like the poem and want to do it justice.

  6. As this was the first essay that I will write in college, I definitely was a little stressed this past week. However, I feel like I was able to organize my time and my thoughts pretty well. I also was really appreciate for the small group conversations, because I learned so many new ways to think about a poem. Some students looked at specific words, themes or even the title of the poem to analyze. I used these methods for my own poem that I analyzed. I also was grateful to become connected with Essi and start exploring the different writing tools that Middlebury has to offer.

  7. My favorite part about this week was looking over the poem “If You Are Over Staying Woke” with Walker and Sierra. Breaking a poem down in casual discussion made it much easier. We realized that there are some really recognizable white stereotypes, and the way the poem uses them was super interesting to me. Also, watching the Hozier “Take Me to Church” music video was way more applicable to the class discussion than I thought it would be, and I forgot how good his music is.

  8. I think that by working through all of these questions and poems, I feel a lot more confident in the simplicity of a question. While the essay is definitely scary and hard, it does feel easier after working through this many examples. My top 3 favorite poems are still staying quiet, if you are over being woke, and dancing in buses. Out of those, I think dancing in buses might be my favorite to read, I think because of how immediately I thought of the last lines of The Hollow Man by T.S. Eliot (This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.) I grew up reading a lot of T.S. Eliot (fun fact that is who I am named after), so it felt really cool that in the first week of college I was able to use that and connect that back.

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