Hey Y’all, Max here.
I have almost no experience with poetry. While I pride myself on being a decent writer, I understand that writing paragraphs and essays is not the same thing as poetry. So, you may ask, what happens when I am forced to make words into art? You’ll soon discover this when I unveil the last 2 weeks of the humanities project Working with Words.
This project sped past at an alarming speed. This is because we had just come off of winter break and there was only about 2 weeks left until the semester changed, along wth our classes. The project was cut even shorter than it was originally supposed to be because our winter break was extended amidst fears of the new “omicron” variant of Covid-19.
The project had a very simple structure to it. One could even say it was hastily planned. At the beginning of the project we learned all about universal rules for most poems, and also how to structure and pace a poem and other stuff like that. But every day after, we would learn a new form of poetry, and we would write a pome in that style. the ultimate goal was to make about a dozen poems and compile them into a poetry book for all to see. We would then find out about halfway through the project that we would be presenting some poems to an audience, but I’ll talk about that later.
Most of the poems we did were styles of poetry that I had heard of before. Regardless, I had difficulty writing a few of them. I found it hard to put some words together, and also to stick to a central theme or rhyme scheme. Right when I think I’ve got something, I find it’s impossible to put it together or make it rhyme or something similar to that. If there’s one poem I enjoyed making it was the found poetry poem. Found poetry is where you take an already existing piece of writing and only take some words from it until it becomes something that makes sense, or matches a theme. Anyways, the pre-existing text I used was actually lyrics from the song Love , by the hip-hop artist Mos Def. Mos Def’s songs have some of the best rhymes I’ve ever heard, and I thought it would be easy to pull a few lines from my personal favourite song of his. Turns out, it was. If you want to read it, it will be linked below in my poetry book.
The final event for this project was performing our poetry to an audience of our parents.
Kind of. We didn’t exactly perform all of our poems because that would be 11 poems x 53 students ( I think ) which equals 583 poems, which is unreasonable for any audience to sit through, regardless of how good the poems are. What PLP 9 did is split everyone into random three-person cells, have two groups create a poem of a randomly assigned style, combine them, and then make one poem by six people. This sounds complicated and to be honest I don’t know how PLP thinks of this stuff. There was probably an easier solution to this. Anyways, the presentations for each of these poems seemed hastily planned.
The final Poem I wrote with Erik, Faith, Ewan, and Ariane.
Eventually the PLP teachers decided to stuff all of PLP 9 into the annex ( the classroom opposite the main PLP room ) and take groups one at a time in front of a laptop that was live in front of the parent audience and present their poem. In between presentations there was a collage of about me videos by us Ms. Willemse and the PLP teachers had edited. Overall, everything went fine but it seemed like it could have gone better.
I don’t have much t say about this project since it was so short. One thing I can definitely say is that if this project lasted the standard 3-4 weeks, I would not be having a good time. It’s not that I necessarily disliked this project, it’s just that there isn’t much to expand upon when it comes to poetry.