Write a 200-word posting to our course blog page for the event in which you reflect on Warn’s craft talk and your experience of the writing exercise done then. You might include here the result of your exercise from that session.
English 289
Official Course Blog–Fall 2013
Rob Mendez
Dr. Weinstein
English 289
14 November 2013
Extra Credit→ Poetry Reading by Emily Warn 11/14
This second poetry reading was by far my favorite by far that Mrs. Emily Warn presented. Mrs. Warn described poetry in a way that I had never thought of before. She described the close relationship and duality between music and poetry. She described the similarities, such as; the words and speech of poetry is sort of transferred into musical songs. She explained the equation of melody and poetry, speech + Elements you create. The language tunes your ears to hear beats of the rhythm by listening to the sounds of the words. Mrs. Warn’s best example of the relationship between music in poetry in my opinion was when she compared them; musical composers use notes and poets use words. Also she emphasized the importance of punctuation in poetry, and how it can let the reader know what tempo and or rhythm the writer is expressing. Finally Mrs. Warn explained to us the meaning of poetry; that it is centered around one’s imagination and creation, that poems do not have to make logical sense, just express the meaning and feeling.
The craft talk exercise Mrs. Warn had us do was to first right a few sentences about something we experienced in the past few days. She then told us to break up the words and thoughts we wrote and add punctuation to create a poem, and make it flow in one way or another. The different students who volunteered to read theirs were absolutely vividly amazing, and not to mention, much better than mine. I enjoyed to overall exercise, speech, and experience, I learned it is always helpful to keep an open mind in poetry.
I had a lot of fun during the conference with poet Emily Warn. I also learned a lot of information on writing and reading poetry and how certain aspects can make a big difference on the tone of the poem. I learned how to break up sentences that, with no apparent rhythm added, still have a subtle rhythm of the English language. She explained how reading a poem from many different points of view is another way to learn the rhythm of the poem and the stresses that were put on each syllable. I also enjoyed her poem readings of the poets that she enjoyed, as well as the poems that she wrote by herself. She also explained her writing process with the group, from the places that she sat and wrote to the certain people or animal and their actions affected the meaning of the poems. I learned that most poems are brought together by simply writing sentences down, releasing the ideas from the mind, then placing them in order of stresses and syllable count by lines.
The craft talk given by Emily Warn was interesting to me. She read the poems in a way that I would have never read them, making them more clear to my understanding. She also compared poetry to music, which is also something I would have never done. Emily Warn stated “the only difference between a poet and a composer is a poet uses words, and a composer uses notes.” She made this sound so interesting that I almost wanted to read the poems, but instead of reading them, sing them in my head. We had discussed distressed sounds in poems in class before, but I had never though of it as a sense of music. Poetry has many elements, all which help us to create a meaning of them.
To start Emily Warn had us write a sentence or two about something we had experienced within the last few weeks. She then later had us break up these sentences, as if to almost turn them into short poems. When we did this writing exercise with her, I could not really grasp an understanding because I am not very great at poetry. However, she really showed us that we could turn any simple sentence into a poem.