UWS Lights and Poetry

Hi, everyone!

A chilly end to a chilly week. Yikes. That wind was not kidding around today. But it was still so beautiful on the Upper West Side tonight. Lights and people everywhere. Straight out of a NYC movie but even better because I got to walk through it.

I was on the UWS tonight because part of my poem is published in this year's edition of Macaulay Press so I went to pick up my copy tonight. Poetry is something that I both enjoy reading and writing, and I hope to do it for as long as my creative juices flow.

Speaking of poetry, my English class (which focuses on the poetry of Dickinson, Moore, and Stein) this semester has been so different from any English class that I've ever taken. Most professors are very concerned with students having a concrete thesis. Professor Dow doesn't so much focus on a thesis as he does on questions. He asks us to include our questions and confusions about the poems in our essays, and let them be the framework. I think that this is a great way of reading poetry or any difficult text because often when you're able to put what's confusing you into a question, then you're halfway to finding some kind of answer(s) to it. He also encourages us to delve deeply into the difficulty of a poem and not be afraid to have multiple interpretations of a line or a stanza. Poetry is not like 2 + 2, which only has one correct answer. There can be many ways to understand verses because words and patterns of words can be flexible in their meaning. Also, interpretations of a poem vary from person to person because they are shaped by the personal experiences and literary background of the person who happens to be reading it at that moment.

Tomorrow, I'm planning on heading to the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side for my Jewish history class. It will be my third time going, but my first time writing about it for a class. I'll include pics in my next post. :)

S.

Quote of the Week

“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” 

~ Mark Twain