Blog #9 - Jay Jiang - Period 1 - 2/24/2020

February 24/2020

Jay Jiang

Period 1 Reading

Aim: How can we use the poem, “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams as inspiration for own poems? 

Do Now: Describe a time when you or someone you know did something that was “technically wrong” and you should have felt sorry for it but you didn’t?

For our do now, we wrote about situations in which we should have apologized to the other party but we didn’t. When it was time to share, none of us gained the courage to share but luckily Ms.Peterson was there and saved us by sharing her story about how she slapped her cousin but still refused to apologize to him. After the do now, we spirit read the poem “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams.

Class Notes

This Is Just To Say

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

This is a free verse poem. Although it doesn’t use rhymes, it is still able to be constructed into a poem. This poem was written by William to his wife which he hung on the refrigerator. This builds on to the do now since William did something bad but is also not that sorry about it as he goes on to describe how the plums were delicious, sweet and cold. We continued reading and read another short poem in which the author did some things that he should have apologized for and even though he wrote he was sorry, he doesn’t mean it.

After this we learned about imagery in poems and this is the root of imagination. 

• … Image is the root word of imagination. It’s from Latin imago, “picture,” how you see things. Images carry feelings.  Saying, “I’m angry,” or “I’m sad,” has little impact. Creating images, I can make you feel how I feel.
• Writing poems using images can create an experience allowing others to feel what we feel. 
• Perhaps more important, poems can put us in touch with our own often buried or unexpected feelings.

After we were exposed to the meaning of imagery, we experienced it ourselves by reading short poems that contained imagery in it. Each poem dramatizes imagery and uses it to create a feeling whether it was the landscape creating hopelessness or natural images such as the ocean to create joyfulness. 

We then moved on to a longer poem called “Fast Break” by Edward Hirsch and we had to annotate it. The poem talks about a basketball with the author scrambling to jot down every single detail. It builds suspense and we can imagine ourselves on the court as we see every detail and what every single person. After spirit reading the poem and annotating it, we either worked with our groups or with a partner to finish the TWIST Analysis.

T - Tone

W - Word Choice

I - Imagery

S - Style

T - Theme

I worked with my partner and discussed with him as we pulled evidence from the poem and jotted it down to find the theme.

T - The author wrote it as  suspenseful since it was very fast as the author describes everything

W - The word choice used comes from someone who has education and is very descriptive about everything

I - The author uses a lot of description relating to sight as he describes what he sees.

S - The author writes this poem with thought as he scrambles to jot down all the interesting facts so he has writes with passion as we can tell. People who don’t write with passion tend to write things that are more boring.

T - Teamwork makes the dream work

An imperative statement was also added to the analysis where we wrote something that interprets this poem. My partner and I wrote “With the support of your team, anything is possible.”

Reflection

In today’s class, I learned about how imagery impacts a poem and how it turns something that is boring into something packed with energy. For example, instead of writing “Today is raining”, you can write “The clouds turned dark as thunder filled the air. Out of nowhere, people began to run, going back home for shelter. A loud BOOM cracks the sky as rain falls down from the sky”. Although both these sentences are talking about the same concept, rain, the 2nd one packs a more powerful punch as the readers now have something to base their imagination on. I learned it because it helps the readers imagine it better and allows for them to know exactly what you were thinking while you were writing. For “Today is raining”, there is an infinite amount of scenarios that you can come up with, but if you add imagery, you know exactly what happened. I can use what I learned when I am writing my own poem by adding imagery to make my poem not sound too vague. If I just fill the page with words, it would most likely make the reader bored but with action there, it is more meaningful and makes a more lasting impact.