Who wore it better? : Comparison of experiences between writing poetry and writing about poetry
Hey, it’s your favorite gossip girl, and I have a question for you—-
What's the difference between eating and cooking food?
When I ask this question, I want you to think of the professional eaters/food bloggers we see on Instagram or YouTube vs chefs.
They both have different views and different purposes. Someone who is a food blogger will sometimes have or grow a keen understanding of food. Possibly it’s because they were once a chef or worked in the food industry. I think this conversation is similar to the discussion of “producer and consumer”. Both can be experts, but they work towards different goals. This was very much like experiencing, analyzing a poem, and writing a poem.
On one hand, I am seeking to understand or argue the author's point or what I believe is their point. This is heavily weighed on my validity and scholarship as a source. Writing about poetry, I am the food blogger. Reporting what I see, feel, and taste in the poet's words. Writing about poetry informs my own poetry by reviewing my understanding of how certain mechanics work. As Dr.Overman says, “ You have to know the rules to break them”. Writing about classical poets and seeing how they use certain tempos or figurative language to convey this or that influenced the choices I made when writing my poem. I also sometimes think of it in the sense that if someone were to write a paper about my poem, what would they be able to glean from it? What avenues of understanding are there?
On the other hand, I am seeking to convey my own story and emotions in a way that expresses my state of mind of feelings. This is less weighted, and it’s free for me to fill in, even if it is not free verse. What is similar about writing about poetry and writing poetry is that you are on a mission. One mission is to understand the other is to convey. They switch between writing about poetry and writing poetry to where both are understanding and conveying just in different capacities. Like the food bloggers and chefs, both have an honor if not love, for food. So where a food blogger may say something needed more of something, the chef says otherwise is not just a difference of opinion, and we should untimely take the chef's side but understand that their viewpoints are different. A food blogger might be for the masses and universal taste buds, but the chef is only for the European palette.
What did you learn from this experience that you could use in your future teaching?
What I learned from this experience that I can take to use in my future teaching is the same curiosity that had us all watching “How it's made” is the same curiosity that can be brought in teaching poetry. I can teach my students how to write about a poem and then intrigue them with learning how it's made, and give them a creative outlet. In a way, it all comes back to compassion. By having them understand what it takes to write what they analyzed and possibly tore apart, it brings a humbling, compassionate experience.
So I ask you, reader, who wrote it best, the writer or analyzer? xoxo - Gossip girl
I never thought I would see "How It's Made" mentioned in the year 2025 but I can safely say I'm happy to be surprised. I think you're absolutely right, by studying poetry, the reader is invited to peek beyond the curtain that guards the mechanics of poetry from the untrained eye. In a way, it's exactly like learning how to see how the cake is baked, to borrow your food metaphor. What I found myself doing while writing my own poetry that I wasn't at first conscious of at first was how I was, in a sense, engaging in a dialogue with Emily Dickinson (who I wrote my essay on). I found myself considering the choices she made in her writing and why she may have made them and asking myself how I might emulate that same focused intent. Like you put it, I found myself thinking like a chef instead of a mere food blogger.
ReplyDeleteHey Anahise! I think your analogy of food bloggers vs. chefs is actually perfect for describing the difference between writing poetry and writing about poetry. I mentioned in my blog post that in one of my other classes we were broken into groups and tasked with looking at NCTE articles about teaching writing, and my group's article was about how reading and writing are linked; the more you read, the more it helps with writing and vice versa. I found that idea interesting enough in that class, but immediately found it applying to this class as well when discussing writing poetry vs. writing about poetry. Like you mentioned Dr. Overman saying "you have to know the rules to break them," reading and analyzing poetry is what helps us when actually writing poetry; the mystery behind writing goes away when you have the tools needed to actually write. Poetry is something I have always dreaded analyzing because I put so much pressure on myself to decode some kind of cryptic message (I know this sounds crazy), but writing poetry has helped me realize a lot of it is more straightforward than I thought.
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