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7th Grade Poetry Portfolio: Reflections

27 April 2015

Dear Ms. Maio,

The poem I consider to be my best is my mimic poem. I feel it uses great descriptive language, onomatopoeia, rhyme, other literary devices, and expresses feeling. In one stanza I wrote, “When flowers sprout up from the ground, In brilliant colors of all kinds, And the air is just a bit sweeter and fresh,”. This shows where I describe the scenery to give the reader a more vivid picture of springtime. One line reads, “From the robins with their cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up,”. Here I illustrate the sound of spring, using onomatopoeia and the sound of bird calls. Throughout the poem I also express a feeling of optimism towards spring. The feeling contributes to the purpose of entertaining the reader. The mimic aspect of the poem allows me to write a poem similar to the great Emily Dickinson. By relaying her strengths in poetry and adding my own literary devices and feeling in the poem, I consider the mimic poem to be my best.

Keeping the strengths of my mimic poem in mind I could revise my other poems and make them better. For example, in my mimic poem I also used slant rhyme instead of just traditional rhyme. In my couplet poem I used mostly rhyme. Using the slant rhyme, I could have drawn more attention to different parts of the poem, like where I talk about the importance of nutrition. Using both rhyme and slant rhyme I could have also improved my ekphrastic poem. It only had occasional rhyme; unlike my mimic poem where I tried to use it throughout the poem. This would also add more emphasis to some lines, such as where I talk about the impacts of pollution. In my mimic poem I mimicked Emily Dickinson and learned about her strengths and how I could use them to make my poem better. In my sonnet, I struggled with the meter and structure of the poem. By examining more famous/ well known sonnets I could have studied their techniques and used them to write my own. My villanelle could have used more descriptive language like my mimic poem. When I’m talking about summer I list some favorited parts about it, but never really describe them.  Using descriptive language, onomatopoeia, rhyme, other literary devices, expresses feeling, and learning from other famous poems like my mimic poem, I could improve my others.

I think poetry has affected me as a writer in a couple different ways. One, it has helped me focus on imagery and descriptive language. Imagery is very important in good writing because it can make the writing more interesting and help the reader visualize the text. Especially in the riddles it helps if you use effective adjectives, similes, and metaphors. I think poetry will also help with word choice and vocabulary. In poetry your poems will be very boring if all your words are; similar to imagery, word choice affects how the reader visualizes and interprets the text. How your writing flows can be affected by poetry, too. While working on the sonnet particularly, the meter makes you focus on rhythm as you writeit. In writing, you want all your passages to sound nicely when read, not just poetry. As you can tell by the length of this letter, I’ve learned a lot about poetry and I think overall poetry has improved my writing, as many key components in poetry are used in everyday writing and literature as well.

Sincerely,

Lauren Hill

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