Poetry Response

{ January 26, 2010 @ 2:06 am } · { Uncategorized }

The first poem book I read from our selection was all the small poems. All in all. I did not enjoy this collection of poems. To me, most of them seemed merely descriptive and mundane. I was unsure how deep I should have been interpreting the poems. A few did make me chuckle, though, in their simplicity. Two in particular have stuck with me: “safety pin” on page 48 and “flamingo” on page 64. I enjoyed “safety pin” because of the sharp contrast between the two stanzas describing a safety pin closed and open respectively. “flamingo” humored me through the two photos accompanying the descriptive poem of a pondering flamingo.

I absolutely adored Love that Dog. I feel this book really encompasses a child’s reluctance to poetry, especially a male child, while emphasizing free verse poetry as actual poetry. Many students enter a poetry unit with the assumption that all poems must rhyme when this is not the case. I also savored the narrator’s growth in writing his poetry as well as confidence in himself as a writer. It also became rather difficult not to share the narrator’s exuberance at Walter Dean Myers’ visit as well as his obvious reluctance and melancholy towards his dead pet dog.

The Brown Angels poetry collection was inspiring. The way Walter Dean Myers describes the photos and the lives of the subjects is intensely heartfelt. The words Myers uses sucked me into the short stories they poems paint. The words also flow off my tongue in an astoundingly beautiful way. It’s no wonder Sharon Creech chose to her her narrator focus on Myers poem, “Love that Boy.”

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