Poetry Post

In our poetry unit we read a lot of poems to get a basic idea of what poems are and what makes up a poem. We started defining poetry terms by reading poems and highlighting examples of those terms that we could identify in the poem. This was done in preparation for our poetry test, and later our poetry presentation.

The first type of poem that we studied to look for poetry terms were love poems. We looked at which techniques the poet used to convey different thoughts or feelings in the poems.

Our final project of the term was a group project. I was with Amelia B, Kiyaan Anikah and Jordyn. We had to come up with a topic and then find poems that fell into the category of our topic. We chose “Rebellions” for our topic, and our driving question was “How can we better understand revolutions throughout history through poetry?” . We then presented our poems at a poetry reading for other people (ie. our parents). My part in the presentation was to find a current poem about rebellion today.

I chose a poem about the Hong Kong protests that are currently ongoing. The poem is called A Dragon by Evan Mantyk.

A Dragon

by Evan Mantyk

Hear the rumbling round the world
Of a dragon lying curled—
Not the red one we have seen;
This one has a golden sheen
And will rise to swiftly strike,
Sunder every wall and dike,
Drowning evil on the earth
And its young, though fresh from birth,
Bringing terror yet unknown
For the seeds that have been sown.

After reading the poem, I also presented why I chose this poem, which is below.

Dragon Paragraph

Others in my group presented poems about rebellions going back to the 1840’s. Looking at poems that describe similar events but from vastly different times provides a very different kind of insight called historical perspective. Historical perspective requires you to do some research about the time period that the poem was written in in order to really understand what the poet was talking about. It also allows for a direct comparison between older and more modern poems that let you see how much things have changed over time.

We did an historical analysis of love poems as well, which really highlighted for me how much dating has changed in the last 100 years. Here is the paragraph I wrote about historical perspective for the love poems I compared.

Historical understanding love poetry

Overall, I don’t really like poetry that much but through this project of looking at poems through historical perspective, I was able to see how poetry could be used to explain things in a different way that can be looked back on in the future. Don’t expect to find any poems from me being looked back on in the future though – it’s not my preferred method of communication.