Hi there, everybody! It’s me again. I probably don’t need to specify that anymore, since nobody else has the password to my blog44 account and I’m not planning on giving it to anyone either. I digress.

To be honest, when I found out that we were going to be doing a project about poetry, I wasn’t exactly excited. You see, I thought that we were going to be studying things like the lives of famous poets and the history of modern poetry and things like that, but like most projects in PLP, I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome of this project. It was, like usual, nothing like I had expected.

Compared to the other projects we’ve done, this wasn’t a very long project. We started it on January 10th and today’s date is January 27th.

We started this project by being told that we would be compiling all of our poems that we would make into a book in the app Book Creator. Book Creator is honestly a really fun app to play around with and I would recommend you try it out sometime. Our first in class activity regarding this project was learning about simile poems. Simile poems are poems that are created to compare something to another thing. throughout this project, we learned about many other typed of poems and I’ll talk about some of them throughout this blog post. We were put into random groups and were given a simile poem to discuss. Then, we were instructed to make our own simile poem, following a standard format of:

As ___ as a ___ ,

As ___ as a ___ ,

etc…

We then went around the room basically making an improv poem following that template and with the rhyme scheme A,B,A,C. Oh right, a rhyme scheme is kind of like a code or legend describing the way different lines in a poem rhyme with each other. Lets look at Dr. Suess’s Green Eggs and Ham. I’ll put a letter next to each line representing what rhymes.

I do not like (A)

Green eggs and ham (B)

I do not like them (C)

Sam I am (B)

The rhyme scheme would be A,B,C,B because like 2 rhymes with line 4 but lines 1 and 3 don’t rhyme. The most common and simple rhyme schemes are ABAC, ABCB,  AAAA, and ABAB. When you say all the letters together like they’re a word it sounds kind of funny. “Abab”… I’m getting off topic again.

The next thing we did was my favourite part of this project. Haikus. I’m not entirely sure why, but I just found haikus to be really amusing and interesting. I made one called mongoose, which I love.

What is mongoose plural?

It’s actually mongooses

Mongeese sounds better

In all honesty, I actually really like that one. I also really enjoyed free verse poems. If you don’t know what a free verse poem is, it’s a poem that doesn’t have any specific rhyme scheme, or just doesn’t rhyme at all. I think I liked these the best because neither of them have to rhyme so you can focus more on the contents of the poems and the meaning of the words and the feeling it gives you and the imagery of the poem, rather than if the words rhyme with each other. There were a lot of times throughout this project where I would think of a word that would be perfect for the whole mood and imagery of what I was writing but then realized it didn’t rhyme and would completely mess up my rhyme scheme, so couldn’t use it. Obviously, this would be a huge bummer whenever it happened, and I could just completely eliminate this problem by eliminating the rhyme scheme entirely.

At the end of this project, we compiled all of our work into an e-Book, complete with an “About Me” video and complementary texts for each of the poems that we had written. I made another post about that so I’ll link it here.

In conclusion, I enjoyed this project a million times more than I thought I would. It was just a super cool way to express myself and I’ve realized I like poetry a lot more than I thought I did.

I hope you enjoyed all 721 words of this blog post and I’ll see you all next time.

Bye!

-Dylan