Original poems 3

Diego-Ladder Poem

Diego
My brother
Goofy and Funny
Best big brother ever
Not the best role model
But I love him
And miss him
Making changes
Improving

Loneliness-Free Verse

Worst feeling ever
Even worse then bored
And I hate being bored
More then being stabbed by a sword
Everyone needs company
Be nice to that weird kid
Even if your friends don't approve
He'll never forget what you did
Things like that mean so much
5 minutes and you'll make their day
And remember you're never really alone
God's always there just pray

June-Sestina

Damn I love June
What's not to love?
It's my birthday month
Turning 16 this year
Get my permit and drive
And best of all summer

I absolutely love summer
My favorite month being June
I can't wait to drive
Just in time for Junior year
The freedom I'm going to love
Just 5 more months

I enjoy any summer month
Good things happen during summer
Best summer was this year
When school ended in June
I fell in love
This summer I'll drive

and I'm so excited to drive
In 5 short months
I will most certainly love
driving during the summer
Starting last day of June
And continuing for years

The end of Senior year
Out of the lot I'll drive
Someday in June
A glorious month
Starting off the summer
The season I love

Not as much as I love
The school I've been in for years
What a change this summer
When I can finally drive
Only 5 months
What a glorious June

Original poems 2

Apology

Sorry Dad
for being a teen
and causing you
great amounts of stress

Just 3 more years
And ill be gone
leaving you
with gray hairs

3 kids
must be hard
but you stay strong
I love you Dad

Swift


Squirrels are
interesting animals
quick and squirrelly

Always on the move
choppy movements
always so alert

searching around
for their buried nuts
hibernation starts soon

moving frantically
panicking due to
the lack of time

Opposites

Never been so tired
Can't get anything done
Content with the day
My mind can't focus

Can't get anything done
So much energy
My mind can't focus
Want to go out and run

So much energy
Don't know what to do
Want to go out and run
But I think I'd rather sleep


Never been so tired
Don't know what to do
But I think I'd rather sleep
Content with the day

Original Poems 1

Acrostic Poem

Makes me forget
Unnecessary and unimportant
Stress that is unavoidable
In life, music is life
Changing

Strong Words

Fighting viciously for freedom
for liberty
for the day the unstoppable
is stopped
Chief walking with swag
in his infinite power
be powerless
use Stealth to achieve liberty
lose everything to gain everything
infinite
equality

Terzanelle

I am unstoppable                          
Nobody can beat me                    
That's improbable                          

Nothing special about me              
An unwavering will to win              
Nobody can beat me                    

Addicted to sin                              
Sacrifice needed to succeed          
An unwavering will to win              

Nothing is guaranteed                    
Doubt will fill your mind                
Sacrifice needed to succeed          

An unwavering reason you need to find      
Keep you going through those times          
Doubt will fill your mind                              

Victory isn't always, just sometimes
I am unstoppable
Keep you going through those times
That's improbable

What I Need to Know about WRITING AND WRITERS to become a better writer

Me and my partner chose the topic question "What makes a piece of writing good?" It may seem like a general question but some people have a general idea or criteria that a book or piece of writing needs to fit for it to be "good." I want to know if that is a constant thing, or if it varies depending on personal interest. I want to know sure things that are guaranteed to attract attention to my work. I know how to form and structure my writing, but I lack something that makes it different. I lack the factor that makes my writing stand out. I want to know what things you can add or things you shouldn't add to make my writing be the most eye grabbing and interesting writing that it can be. Obviously if these people were successful in publishing a piece (which I have heard over and over is so hard to do these days) then something about their writing wasn't the same as everybody else's. Something about their writing stood out for it to get published. I want to know if there's a specific criteria for what makes writing good, or even just a few tips on things I can add to make it better.

Vocabulary on my mind

The brevity of the insolent toady's behavior was castigated and he was mollified by the contemporary and unprecedented pugnacious subordinate who was extremely pretentious and had an unwavering desire to be venerated despite the fact that he was ponderous and a narcissist who, due to a lassitude, was quiescent and began to prattle which caused people to view him as an enigma but the subordinate convalesced and was rebuked by the strident crowd that had a plethora of epicurean non-affable people.

Round 4 = Marni Gillard

I enjoyed this reading. It evoked my emotions and many forgotten memories. As a swimmer there's a lot in this reading that I could personally relate to. I enjoyed her use of literary devices, specifically her similes. The part where she back flops I can relate to. Many times I personally, or a sibling of mine, has either belly or back flopped. I shared her fathers laughter when I read the line, "Nooooo, Daaady, I didn't do it right."I could almost hear her saying that in my imagination. One of my favorite lines is, "His advice fit me like a too-big-hand-me-down shirt." I love this comparison, I think it's an outstanding simile. I would have never in a million years put those 2 together. I completely understand because I have an older brother and growing up, my parents were pretty darn stingy. Twice in the book she uses a simile to compare her dad to a sea animal. The first example is, "riding his hairy back like a whale." The other example is, "He looked up, shaking the water off like a seal." I think what works best in the journey chapter is when she talks about watching the audiences emotions during a storytelling. I had never thought about that, I'm always too nervous to take the time to read the faces of the audience. It makes sense though, that's the only way to find out what other people are thinking about your story. I wouldn't know what to remove from the journey part if it needed to be cut. I'm never good at these things, it's all obviously extremely important and meaningful to her so I don't think any of it would need to be taken out.

1/12 speaker = (****)

Round 3=Mary Moriarty

After reading Mary's villanelle, I learned some things about the style of this poem. It revolves around rhymes. Each stanza has 3 lines, each second line rhymes with the others. The first and third lines also all rhyme. The last word of each stanza alters between 2 words, no stanza rhymes with any other word besides those 2. For example the first stanza ends with disaster, the second with master, the third with disaster, fourth with master, and the 5th and 6th with disaster. Here's a list of the end words from the 2nd lines. Intent, spent, meant, went, confident, evident; they all rhyme. Here's my attempt at writing a villanelle.

I always got a hat on my head
I have 9 different snapbacks in my room
I'm only without one in my bed

I've always been smart my parents said
But listening's been a problem since I was in the womb
My biggest fear is being dead

Enough about me, I let it get to my head
Literally, without jokes life's a gloom
Without jokes I wouldn't get out of bed

One thing I will always dread
The feeling of missing someone, someone whom
Has always been there but will eventually be dead

When that day comes I'll be hanging on by a thread
The thought of it makes my head go boom
Then I really won't get out of my bed

After reading the poem The Backseat of My Mother's Car, by Julia Copus, I got a sense of the style used. The poem is structured in a way such that when you read it, you get a false understanding of the line until you continue reading and finish the sentence. Every sentence is split and spans over more then one line. To give you an example of this I'll show you how the poem starts.
"We left before I had time
to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched
hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted". The first line seems like a sentence in itself, but it continues to be a smaller part of a bigger sentence. The first line is also the last line, they both read "We left before I had time". There's no rhyme pattern that I could identify.

I enjoyed the poem Fatherland by Mary Moriarty. The thing I probably liked about it the most is the form. I love how the form gives you a different understanding of the poem every time you read it. It doesn't allow you to read it the way you read a basic book. I liked the usage of her metaphors, for example "and I am left holding an album of nameless warriors." Another metaphor she used is "the hollow middle with it's coatless summers."

I was not as fond of the poem Track Photo. It had a depressing tone (for lack of a better word) in it. I'm usually not fond of sad poems. I like how the poem ties together, and how she doesn't go on and on, it's short and to the point. She uses a small amount of words to tell a bigger story. I like how she doesn't come straight out and say it, she tells the reader in a kind of mysterious or hidden way. For example when talking about the person in the track photo, she wrote "Now you are missing, your urn pushed." Clearly the person has passed away but she doesn't say it like that.

Thanksgiving

2 years ago

at my mom's house

the last Thanksgiving with Diego

before he went away

Even though it pains me

I'm thankful for it

If he didn't, we'd still be at home

fighting/arguing over something

we both don't care about

There was so much tension between us

the smallest of things

were blown way out of proportion

not because we actually cared

just to have a reason to argue

and be upset at each other

Visiting him now, we never fight

he's finally someone I can look up to again

I can't wait for him

to come back home

It'll be like being young again

even though I'm still young

2 years ago

Marilyn Kemp-Mystery Writer

Marilyn Kemp is extremely good at supporting her characters with an abundance of detail. When she first introduces a new character, she immediately gives a quick and detailed description of him/her. Throughout the exerpt she adds more detail but in a very suttle manner. One example is when she writes, "Van Wiesal excused himself to look for a coal with which to light his pipe." This shows the fact that Van Wiesal is a smoker but in a way that doesn't jut out from the story. It's not obvious that she's trying to add character to her character. An example of how Marilyn adds detail to her character upon introduction is a line saying, "The stranger was dressed in a stained but sturdy white shirt and tea colored waistcoat." She puts a visual image of the "stranger" in your head. Even the way Marilyn refers to this character as a stranger at first is one way she adds a sense of mysteriousness to her stories. The ending of the exerpt also adds to Marilyn's mystery factor in the story. At the end, a man participating in a play collapsed due to drunkness at the first assumption. Creasy announced the man dead after more closely inspecting him. The cause of this man's death is unknown, adding even more to the mystery of the story.

1.) What are some easy ways to add a sense of mysteriousness to your writing?
2.) When reading, what are some specific examples of things that appeal to you? or catch your interest?

Speaker 1/6=****

Round One Susan Cominos

The biography is extremely short and doesn't really provide any information about Susan as a person but more as a writer and of her accomplishments. Clearly Susan is a hard working poet, I doubt any lazy poet could achieve the title of "the winner of the 2010 Yehuda Halevi Poetry Competition run by Tablet Magazine." While reading her poetry, one thing I quickly realized was the inability to comprehend. I had to go back and re-read her poems multiple times to even begin to understand any meaning of it. Her vocabulary is way above average and she prefers to use a hidden meaning style. In a review of her poem Getting Out of the Roman Bath, Jake Marmer says "The poet's meanings cannot be, as it were, nailed down." I had less trouble understanding this poem than understanding deconstruction workers. This is more of an opinion than a fact, but I assume she is a patient person because of the choice of her words. I can't imagine it taking a small period of time to put words like hers into her poems. From reading her poems I think she is most likely religious, because of her mentions of Christianity in 2 of them. In Getting Out of the Roman Bath one line says "-a crucifix at the door" and in Deconstruction Workers one line says "become a Christian sprig." Her poem Deconstruction Workers also gave off the impression that she's into nature. She mentions plants multiple times and even references an animal at one point.