From Analyzing Poetry to Making My Own

As someone who used to write a lot of poetry as a hobby and a coping mechanism when I was tired of Kdramas on Netflix during COVID-19 many years ago, I would certainly say that writing poetry is easier for me than writing about poetry. However, that doesn't mean that writing about poetry wasn't also fun and creative, especially as I wrote about "Jabberwocky", a fascinating nonsense poem. I would say that writing about poetry first definitely helped a lot with writing poetry, as learning about the different types of poems and reading them definitely helped with making the poems. By doing research on my poem and learning about the intentions of my writer/poet, Lewis Carroll, it definitely helped me get into the mindset of trying to be a poet. I would say that even if I were to write poetry first then write a paper about poetry, the former experience would still be very helpful as then I could better resonate with the poet I was writing about. 

    There is freedom and a creative aspect in both writing poetry and writing about poetry as well as limitations. When writing poetry, especially about ones experiences, you can be as creative as you wish even with your structure of the poem, or even write a love poem to a pigeon (If you know, you know)! However, if you are writing your poem on a certain structure, you should be careful to adhere to your desired structure. In my case, I chose a list poem. When writing the poem, I wondered how I could effectively list a lot of things without ironically being too repetetive or redundant, until I turned it into a poem about the racing thoughts and questions one has when adulting (and one will inevitably face by well-meaning relatives) as those What if or When questions are common. When writing about poetry, while you can write about any reasonable interpretation and argue for it, I struggled to focus on just one interpretation and with balancing talking about the author, the historical context, and the poem's content itself. In both writing about poetry and writing poetry, context was significant. When writing about poetry, I had to consider the poem as it is viewed from a modern perspective and how it was viewed at the time, while when writing poetry, I had to consider being authentic to my experience and the accessibility of the poem to be understood by the audience. Just as I hope my essay about Jabberwocks and Bandersnatches was still understandable and readable, I had to make sure my own poems were performable even if they looked good and read well on paper.

In my future teaching, I will definitely use this example of having a creative assignment after a research one or after teaching about a specific chapter or unit. These more creative assignments are a good way to engage the students in learning while they are having fun, as well as being a good way of ensuring the students understood the topic well enough to express it in their own way.