Modernist Poetry Experiments

http://www.personal.psu.edu/kmh5091/Lesson%208%20poems.htm

http://www.personal.psu.edu/kmh5091/Lesson%208%20poems.htm

For this lesson, we read Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. Reading Stein is a unique experience, as her writing is off the wall and all over the place. In the poems I created based on her Objects, Food, and Rooms writings I tried to have aspects of Stein's uniqueness come through, just not as evident as she did. These poems were unlike anything I had ever written before. I tried to get outside my comfort zone and write more abstractly like Stein did.
I chose to write about my Guitars for the objects portion, describing them as in depth and logically as I could. For the food, I chose what I ate over the weekend, Meatloaf. I chose to personify the meatloaf saying it was rough and had a hard life. Finally, for the rooms portion of the poems I chose to write about my room here in my apartment. I chose this because it is the first time in my 20 year life that I have had my very own room. I tried to get the point across that I was actually in love with my room, using as many romantic and loving words I could.

After the poems were written, it was time to experiment. For my Guitars poem I chose the method of the First/Last word poem. This totally takes a lot from the poem but also lets the reader look it at in a different light. Since I wrote the poem, reading it in this new form, I can still tell it is about my guitar. It still contains mere references to guitars with the words, but can be interpreted to mean something else as well. In the Meatloaf poem, I decided to add an excerpt from a Wikipedia article on the singer Meat Loaf. Mostly, I did this because I find the singer Meat Loaf very comical. I don't like his music at all, but I couldn't resist myself with this one. The comment about him breaking the sound board is just funny to me and can't be true. This brings some humor to the already comical poem I wrote. In the last poem about my very first room, I decided to take every object in the room that I wrote in the poem and replace it with the very literal description of the object. For example, bed becomes box of springs. It makes for an interesting read and causes the reader to think of how the things we use every day and how very simply they can be described. It also shows how one word can change into many words, it depends on how descriptive an author wants to be.

Overall, I enjoyed this assignment, as I always like to put my thoughts on paper (or this time the web). I also enjoyed experimenting with things that were already written. The writing process could go on forever as one work can transform for eternity.