creative project 3 peer review

            So I should probably mention that I was only in one class in the last week considering I was pretty much unable to get out of bed on Monday due to sickness, so for todays blog I am going to discuss the editing process in association with creative writing project 3.

            First thing I should mention, I find it difficult to edit other peoples papers. Of course, the day I was peer reviewing other people’s assignments in this class was the same day I had been peer reviewing other peoples assignments in my two classes before this class. So by this time, I was kind of peer reviewed out, luckily I broke out my second wind and kept on trucking.

            I find it difficult to peer review for several reasons, number one being I’m not sure how to be a complete jerk when I find someone has an assignment that needs a lot of changes. Another issue is when I’m reading something that I just purely don’t know how to edit like poetry, where what I read sounds good but is something I’m purely not skilled at in giving advice in. Finally, I find it awkward as well to give praise, as I feel like the author of any work really shouldn’t want any praise, as praise doesn’t do anyone any good.

            This being said I also find it awkward to get peer reviewed, purely because I worry when the person who peer reviews my paper doesn’t notice the giant problem that I noticed the second time reading it. This being said, it is useful to be peer reviewed, it just gets hard for me after a while.

            The peer review process is overall a positive one, it is very useful to have your papers read, and other people can give you an insight that you probably can’t figure out for yourself. I do like having my stuff read, and I have a general curiosity for what is going on with the rest of the class, so these definitely link in with the positive aspects of this process. Hopefully everything turned out well with the peer review process on my postcard story as I’m going to turn it in tomorrow.   

creative project 3

            Just a few comments about Creative writing project 3:

            I decided to do this project on the postcards. Frankly, I couldn’t refuse after seeing a very cute one with a squirrel and a very bizarre one with a puppet. Simply putting them in the middle of sin city seems like a very appropriate setting.  Imagine two puppets in sin city fighting over control? Come on that has to be a fairly unique concept, especially concerning the fact that it was inspired by seeing a couple of postcards.

            Considering two of these postcards did contain puppets I did think that it made sense to put them in a competition, a puppetry competition. I thought about it and putting weird imagery throughout the entire thing seemed to make it more unique.

            I’ve done this whole postcard writing thing before, and I have to say, the weirdest things come out when I do so. The characters are unique, and I feel like I add a mild unique humor that seems to be nonexistent with more time elongated mediums. I’m hoping for the best, and I hope you like it.

Why I like swear words/ creative project 2

While looking over assignment two a dozen times it occurred to me that it’s almost impossible to be groundbreaking. My initial idea, “Swears” consists of the following, essentially every title of every poem/ story is a swear word, and the plot revolves around the swear word to some degree. My main issues with this were that;

1)   This would be incredibly offensive.

2)   There wouldn’t be enough stories to base off swears

            So then I decided, why not push the envelope? Sleeping with the Dictionary, while admitting not my favorite piece of work had something going for it, it was well organized. And it had a theme, it was in alphabetical order, and every piece of work had something to do with the dictionary. It makes sense to me that if I am going to do something unique I have to try new things. I find works of nature and sex frivolous; they are overused, and because of such lose their entertainment value. I of course want to evoke some emotion, but the only way I think I can do it is involving naughty words.  

           

Swear words are the most powerful of words, and that is why I like them. Like a spice, you throw them in too much; they lose their purpose and make things worse. Swears have the power to evoke emotion to an extent to no other (I’m actually liking this so much this might wind up in my actual assignment). Swears are the words to use, to create, to divide, and to conquer.

There is a reason why I am obsessed with the swear, and I refuse to make it a negative thing. Hopefully, these days editing my assignment will give me true perspective on how to make this assignment great. Just because I use a little fowl language now and then doesn’t mean I don’t want to learn.

sleeping with the dictionary blog

Bi lingual instructions/ Harryette Mullen review

Sleeping with the dictionary is a collection of poems, many of them fairly odd. The one I’m going to talk about is the weird instructions one, called “Bilingual Instructions”.

If I had to guess the poems purpose it’d probably be that this was meant to be some political satire about Americans not knowing how speak other languages other than English, or even caring/ and also a look into stereotypes. From the discussion in class, it seems that this was a common thought, and I assume most others who read it would kind of get the same thing as well.

           

This poem is broken up into two parts, the bilingual instructions (literally written bilingual instructions, English than Spanish the line below) describing what I can assume to be gardening, and the first part, starting with “Californians say” and the line below saying to what. Essentially, the poem says Californians don’t want bilingual ballots or schools, but do want bilingual instructions on trashcans, and then it goes to the instructions about how to use a trashcan. To be perfectly honest, there is nothing spectacular about the actual writing of the poem, it seems to be literally stuff that it was copy and pasted from other stuff. However, the idea around the poem is something that is thought provoking and interesting for the very least.

           

This poem attempts to look at how Americans look at the bilingual community (by that I mean those who don’t speak English, or speak it as a first language, specifically Mexicans), as lesser. There is a common stereotype that Mexicans are gardeners, and that Americans only see Mexicans as such; This poem is essentially making a statement, “we don’t want them to do anything other than the lawn”. 

I find that it’s odd that the first part of the poem starts with what appears to be polling statistics, and the second just seems to be an instruction manual. This is how the poem is made, and with it being the way it is done, even something that is hardly literate can understand what is going on.

This poem is very short, and for once that’s a good thing, because it is easy to read and understand.  The Spanish part is a translation of the English, and part of me wonders if there are grammar errors put in as a joke. The style is very exact 2, 2, 2, style which I liked.  In addition, there are dabbles of humor I sensed, with the poem ending “yard trimmings only”, making me feel 

I'm not a poem guy, so I'm not going to say this was the greatest thing I've ever read, however I can appreciate it's purpose. 

doing my paper/ assignment one process

Finishing my paper

            So I decided considering that it would be a good idea to do this blog on the process of completing my final paper, and what went through my head and all that good stuff.

            For starters, I had no idea how to write something like Frank O’Hara’s “Second Avenue”. The man must have been born with a photographic memory and read the dictionary at one point in his life because I was looking up half the words.  As this assignment is open to interpretation, I wanted to write something generally unique, something that wasn’t hard to read but at the same time wasn’t meant for a third grader. It then occurred to me that it would be fun to do a poem about something that most people are uncomfortable with; mast********.

            Once I came up with the topic, I began writing it. Yes, there is visual image with in the poem, but I thought again it would be fun to write a poem where you don’t want to see the visual image. After all poems that I have read about animals, nature, and love, I thought it would be in my best interest to write something that I have never seen before, and hence, me coming back to the topic of choice.  The goal now was to write this in a way to easy to understand, but not to simplified, hence the easy four line stanza’s, with occasional rhythm in almost a sound poetry kind of way. I wrote it almost like I would write a song, easy to follow, but open to some degree of interpretation.

            Next, I wanted to add a little more spice to the mix, having a poem about just the said topic I felt like would be weird. I decided on putting a confused person as the person writing the poem, explaining how he was no good at writing poetry, and finally deciding about writing about such a ridiculous topic. I italicized all the lines that his character wrote, and wrote the one’s he didn’t in a normal fashion. While I was wondering if I should do a one italicized one not, and so on type of pattern, I attempted this and was easily discouraged. I decided on shear randomness on splitting the parts, which made sense considering the content of the poem.

            Finally, my poem was complete. It was something I had never wrote before, and oddly enough I was proud of this little poem. I felt like it had a good sense of humor, something that seems to be largely lacking in other poems that I read. So that is all that went into my poem, and trust my, “I have no idea what I’m doing”, but I’m willing to try anything.