Experience with Poetry

      In the past, poetry has been good for me. In elementary school we would make those little books filled with poetry that we wrote, and some by other authors that we read in class. I still have my old books, and I still like to look at them. I think they are really cute and are really nice to have as a memory of the class, and as a bookmark for how I wrote poetry as a kid. Though those are fond memories, my best experience with poetry was last year.
     Last year, we got to read a lot of poetry from all different kinds of books, and then write our own poems. We then put them in our own poetry anthologies and read some for the class. Part of learning to write, read, and perform poetry was just reading poems to other people. We did this cool thing where we would do partner poems. We would have a partner and we would read the poem together and then tell it to the class. I remember it being really cool. The change in voice between the two people reading it, and the emphasis it puts on the different parts of the poems because of the changes. It was really cool to hear how other people interpreted the poem, based on how they said it.
   That unit really changed how I viewed poetry. Before then, I wasn't interested in it. I liked reading novels better because I didn't think that poetry had a deeper meaning besides just the words. I liked the imagery in poems, but I didn't think of anything else inside the poem. Analyzing poems has really made me respect poems because they are like novels in that they have theme, and a meaning, but they can manage to get it across much more quickly and often much more subtly. That is something that is really cool about poetry and why I like it.
  Right now, I do like poetry. I hope that this unit will be fun and give me more reason to like it. I think that it;s fun because it's short, and so analyzing it doesn't take a long time, but there can still be a lot of things to notice.