Project Reflection

When we first started this project I was so against learning anything even about poetry! I hated it. As the time went on and we started breaking down poetry and learning how to understand it I started appreciating it much more. I think I didn’t like it because it was too hard to understand for me. We started reading new poems every day for starters, and seminars. My favorite poems were the kinetic text ones. Kinetic text is a visual of a poem that acts out whatever is going on in the poem. If it says ‘shooting’ it will project the word like it is shooting across the screen. I don’t do so well with computers because I don’t understand how to use them and so I knew I didn’t want to do kinetic text even with how much I enjoyed watching it. I started to break down what I enjoyed learning this year which was genocide and Buddhism. I talked with my teacher Lori and decided that I didn’t want to write about anything happy and genocide is not happy and so that worked out. Once I decided that I wanted to focus on the experience of rape I chose to explain how after such an awful experience you have to keep striving forward and that is where the Buddhism tied in. During this project I learned how to break down poetry and how after anything that is so violent, you need to keep living your life as best you can. Knowing you cannot change anything or even forget anything, you can use the past to help you create your future.

During this process of how to use writing I learned that the more pauses, and emotion, and action you put into your project the more you will engage your audience. This is so hard for some people! Including me. I am not the person I am on stage because I have a lot of stage fright. I am proud of myself for overcoming that fear and reciting my poem to a room full of people. even if I didn’t have as many pauses or umph that I would have liked to have I am still very proud of the outcome to my performance and poem.