Friday, January 31, 2014

Will someone give me a straight answer? What is poetry anyway?

This week in English 495 we discussed poetry and all the wonderful terminology that comes with the subject. As we each went around and  attempted to define a term we looked up in our books, I thought what I always seem to think year after year when the subject of  poetry comes up: "What is a  poem?" or rather  "What defines poetry?" No matter how many literature courses I take this question never seems to be satisfactorily answered. For all the thousands of dollars I have spent in an attempt to acquire some sort of  reservoir of knowledge, I have never been given, or have been able to come to, an absolute definition of what constitutes poetry. While prose narrative is something that is easily defined and identified, poetry and its many forms and functions become more problematic with each class I take. If  I were to take random lines or phrases from a novel and arrange them in quatrains or force them to construct what structurally looks like  a sonnet; does it constitute poetry? Or rather, what if  a poem is not read but instead performed and accompanied by a sound component? Is its still poetry, or is it now music,subject to assessment by criteria of another genre? Part of the reason this sentiment persists is that we tend to read the same poems semester after semester and come to similar dispassionate conclusions about whether it is the technical composure of rhyme and meter or the more figurative concepts of symbol and metaphor that establishes a work as not only poetry but praise worthy poetry. Compare and contrast  exercises similar to what was done in class with the Smiths song always helps to convey the ambiguity and elusive qualities that are generally agreed upon as a constituting factor of a poem. However I think as aspiring teachers we need to take a similar approach to music that is taken with how we view and evaluate film. Film and Lit courses tend to have a higher student participation ratio than your typical  poetry of Shakespeare class. Part of this has to with the accessibility and cultural relevance that film has on the current generation.The simple fact is that the average student, even Lit student, is likely to have seen more movies or TV shows than the number of books that they have read. The same goes for music; a student is likely to have spent far more time listening to and analyzing songs than spent reading and reflecting on poetry. Critical analysis of poetry in contrast to song composition should be a more integral part  of how poetry is taught, especially to younger students. If we are just going to to give them the classics because their good examples of terms we agree are important to a genre that is never concretely defined, why not look for similar "poetic" displays in a modern context. Perhaps instead using old relics of the literary cannon, we should instead attempt to introduce and determine what constitutes the classics of the new cannon and add to the already ambiguous genre that is "poetry".

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Hello

Welcome to my blog!

My name is Jordan Puga and this blog will used to express my opinions about Multigenre Literacy. In this blog I will address questions raised about genre, globalization, and the influence of technology on literacy and how it applies to Secondary Education. I am currently going to school to become an  English teacher so hopefully  this course will provide me with new tools and perspectives in regards to a career in education.