Febuary 12th

This week in class we looked over and discusses different poems in Goldberg’s book writing down the Bones. The first poem that I liked was big concentration. She spoke about concentration one subject but not blocking out everything else. The example of the Zen meditate was used to show concentration. The meditate must use all her energy to focus on her breaths and doing the poses correctly but the mediator is still pretty aware of his/her surroundings. Goldberg says that this is how we should be when we are writing, enjoying our surroundings while still being able to focus on our writing. I think this is something that I need to learn, when I’m doing homework of any kind my surrounding has to be spotless and absolutely silent. Coming from a house with 7 children silence is a luxury that’s very hard to find.

The second poem that I really enjoyed was called don’t marry the fly. In this poem Goldberg again spoke about concentration but she meant to concentrate on the subject being spoken about. People sometimes get carried away when writing papers, focusing on one little detail just a little too much. Sad to say that I am one of those people. Once the writer gets carried away they can completely just steer away from the subject they’d started talking about in the paper, leaving the reader lost. To void this kind of situation I must write an outline for every paper I right making sure that my writing will be well rounded.

In class we also did a poetry exercise that had 20 steps I thought it was a little weird. I tried to make it all make sense as I was writing it but it was impossible so I finally began to write whatever came to mind, not caring if it matched the step before. The exercise reminded me of something my cousins and I used to do, someone would start off drawing the head of an animal. Once they were done they’re fold the paper down so the next person wouldn’t see what they drew. The piece of paper would go around and everyone got to draw a body part. By the time the paper got back to the beginner we’d have what looked like a monster because nothing matched. It was cool.