Journal 4 - Coral

1.      The chapter that has helped me so far is Chapters 3, the “Making the Line (I)”. Chapter 3 deals with listening for the stresses in a word to make a line. The reason Chapter 3 has helped me is because I’m pretty new in the art of poetry and I still don’t quite grasp the idea of meter and stressed/unstressed words. Seeing the example on pg. 42 of the “Round and round the mulberry bush” in the wave diagram. The diagram shows where the stressed words are because they are the peaks of the wave and the unstressed words dip below the wave. For example, in the first line, “Round, round, mul…, bush” are the peaks of the waves since there’s more emphasis being on these syllables while “and, the, berry” aren’t as prominent to say. It shows me where the stressed syllables are and the wave diagram can be applied to other little nursery rhyme kind of songs. On the next page they put in the first four lines of the Spongebob theme song. Another reason this system would be beneficial to me is because I have a hard time using words for just using the music of them and letting myself go, I guess. Starting to understand the stressed and unstressed syllables of words is helping me start listening to words for their music. But I still need a lot of work to get to that point.

2.      Now the poem I chose has to dea with the sound and the music-of-words issue that I have. It’s doesn’t get an actual feature within Chapter 5 “The Sound (and Look) of Sense,” but it’s in the Poems to Consider section. It’s called “Reapers” by Jean Toomer (pg. 92) and it helped try and write the Sound poem we had to do. (It was Exercise 4). The thing I liked most about the poem was the alliteration of the first line going into the second line: “Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones / Are sharpening scythes.” And it reminds me of the t.v. show that used to be on Cartoon Network: The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. Toomer doesn’t used much assonance in the poem, but he does end rhyme throughout the poem. Another thing I like about the poem is the long sounds of the words “black, blade, bleeds, blood.” It’s a bit hard to understand, but it’s like the longer sound the words have, the more doom may be coming. That’s what this poem is kind of like to me: it has longer sounding words, so doom must be coming. The poem helped in because I could play with the sounds of the words and still make a story out of it. I just need to pay attention more and to really listen to the sound of words.  

 

 

-- Sorry this was a little late to come onto the blog.