Literacy Narrative Part 3

I've been working on Remix 2 of my literacy narrative over the past few days, and it's been an interesting project. I ultimately did decide to write poetry, but in many ways it doesn't contain anything that we heard in our creative writing lecture in class. There is no rhythm or rhyme scheme, inconsistent stanza and line lengths, no symbols, and really no imagery either. I feel like it would be considered a "bad poem" by those standards, but really, it's not a bad poem at all, and I don't think anyone would disagree.

Most of the time when I hear someone call a poem "bad," it's because of the way it was taught in a class--that there HAS to be some hidden meaning that can be dragged out of it, and that meaning is the ONLY valid one. I feel like that's why many people I know say that they hate poetry--because it was taught to them badly. My poem has a story and a meaning behind it, and that's really all you need in a good poem. Actually, you don't even need a story. As long as the poem serves some kind of point (and it's EXTREMELY difficult to write anything at all that doesn't have a point) then it's perfectly valid. And that point is not necessarily the "correct" way to interpret a poem, and it certainly isn't the only way to do it. Any poem will have a number of different meanings to a number of different people, and none of them have to be the same meaning that the author sees in it. That's the problem with so many English classes--a teacher gets hung up on what is ultimately their own interpretation of the poem, and students feel frustrated when they see the poem's meaning in an entirely different way.

So I guess this blog is really just getting back at what many of my peers mentioned in their previous blogs--lecturing about creative writing is not very useless, because everybody will have their own interpretation of any given work, and that interpretation is always completely valid.