Tocqueville

In class Tuesday, we talked about the book Tocqueville and the poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". The book Tocqueville is a collection of poems about US foreign and domestic policy written by Khaled Mattawa. The book is written in his opinion on the policy and is very interesting and eye opening as it opens a new point of view on early US foreign and domestic policy. The book includes the US war on Iraq, Somalian war stories, Vietnamese battles and etc. 

The book is interesting because it includes a different element to poems by including a power point and that is not something you normally see. There are many poems in the book, and the one that I read is called Airporter. It's a short poem and I didn't fully understand it but if I had to guess, I would assume that it is about someone waiting in an airport. It takes place in Yardley, Pennsylvania, and he describes it as a not so clean place. It then talks about a woman, but I didn't understand that part.

The other poem that we read is called "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", written by Wallace Stevens. The poem is about a blackbird, and has thirteen separate sections. What I took from the poem is that the blackbird is misunderstood, and people tend to look past it. The poem also portrayed them to be ominous and dark. I really liked the poem and thought that there was a lot of imagery included as well.

Poetry

In class Tuesday, we started to talk about poetry. We talked about all sorts of things associated with it and what makes it a vast topic. Everything from concrete vs. abstract, detail, imagery, description. sensory, metaphors, sound, and visuals. Abstract has a lot to do with love, anger, anxiety, fear, and success, and these are some of the main topics people talk about in their poems. Concrete deals with imagery descriptive words, nouns, etc.

We also mentioned that there are a lot of cliches used in poems, but personally that's okay because its difficult to portray what you are trying to say without using words that you already know and are so used to. Some examples of these words include love, flowers, soul mates, seasons, and even love at first sight. It's easy to use these words because they are usually the first ones you think about. However, if you use more complex words, you can get a deeper meaning with them.

A lot of the poems we read in class used some cliches like the poem "Tell me what you know about dismemberment", when it talks about rain. Sometimes these cliches are overused and they tend to get annoying. You wish for the author to be more creative instead of always talking about love. Personally i shouldn't be complaining because I do the same thing, but then again I don't really write any poetry.

Introduction

   Hello everybody, my name is Brian Davis and i am a freshman at Eastern Michigan University. I love writing and I actually have another blog that I like to use. Creative writing is in my opinion, a great way to express yourself and find new ways to write and get your ideas across. I took this class to not only improve my writing, but to also read other peoples' work and become inspired by their work.

   I come from a large family and we are a creative bunch. My sister and I love to write and we both look to each other for new things to write about. A few of my friends also write and several of them have blogs and I'll read them from time to time to see what they think about the world. Even though I love to write, I'm not really trying to make a career out of it, I just like writing for fun. My passion is the justice system, I'm majoring in criminology and plan on becoming an FBI agent later on.

   I am a huge sports fan as well. you'll always catch me watching the Tigers, Lions, Red wings, and Wolverines on any given day. I would love to become a sports writer if I could, to be able to write about my favorite teams would be amazing. Another passion of mine is cooking, anything with food really. My father and grandmother were both in the culinary field and they taught me everything that I know. There's a lot more about me, but I'll keep it short, but I cant wait to read other students work and what they have to say about the topics we will be talking about.