Posts

The opposite of a gun is wherever you point it

I was able to go see Buddy Wakefield, Brendan Constantine, Derrick C. Brown, Anis Mojgani, preform their poems live at the Holland Project. It was such an amazing experience I highly recommend going to one of their performances. It was surreal to see the people that I’ve only ever seen threw a screen, I was able to give each one a hug and have conversations with them. They also played off of each other which made the whole experience more real. Brendan Constantine even told me that the world needs my writing! One of the more memorable poems I heard was The Opposites Game by Brendan Constantine. Which was about an activity that he did with his students when he was trying to teach them poetry, basically he would find a line from a poem and have the students find the opposite words for all the words in the line from the poem. But when he used this line from Emily Dickinson My life had stood a loaded gun the class was doing just fine until they reached the last word GUN and this simp...

Timed write Heart of Darkness

In the Heart of darkness Marlow is faced with the mystery of mankind vs nature. He wants to explore and see the inner working of the new mysterious place he wants to understand how trade works there. He ends up having his aunt get him a job as a steam boat captain where he would bring supplies to and from the different stations of ivory collectors around the continent. While Marlow is doing his job , he sees a lot of the unjust things that are going on. He acknowledges that the way the darker skinned humans are being treated is wrong and he has to look away when he sees it because it makes him physically sick. He doesn’t understand why they deserve to be treated that way, he mentions how these “savages” are now criminals because they have broken laws they didn’t even know existed. Marlow starts to describe the place as “darkness” and that “this must be what hell is like”. In the end of the book Marlow and a few other people go to see/rescue a man named Mr. Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz is well kn...

Hamlet Overall

Overall Hamlet was an engaging piece of literature I'm glad that my teacher had us read it and spend so much time with it. I appreciate the way he presented hamlet to us, as “a lot of people think that this is one of the best pieces of literature ever written, but you don’t have to agree, I don’t even know if I agree”. He had us go in already questioning how great this play really is, which in turn had us focusing more on what we were reading and trying to understand it. Hamlet was not in my opinion one of the best pieces of literature ever written but it was definitely one of the first plays that Shakespeare did that I genuinely enjoyed. But me feeling this way may be because I am a teenager in high school and Hamlet sounded in multiple instances like a stressed out teen in high school/college. I also really enjoyed seeing all of the different renditions of hamlet and comparing all of the different things the directors took creative liberty on and how each one was able to do the...

Amber's thoughts

So a little while ago my friends introduced me to the musical Things To Ruin it has a whole butt load of good bops. My favorite one is "a son of a gun" because it is really catchy and has some cool figurative language that makes me think of it as more of a poem that someone just put some music to, than just a catchy song. The lyrics   “About a guy whose hand's a hook, guy whose hand's a hook, guy whose hand's a hoo-oo-ook And he's got blood on all his shirts, blood on all his shirts, blood on all his shir-ir-irts Cause everything he feels he hurts,” I enjoy this lyric because it’s a story that has two different meanings the literal where he could actually have a hook for a hand and he ends up accidently hurting most of the things he touches which is tragic but very interesting to me. The figurative language of everything that he likes/loves he kills or ruins which is a fear of mine but hearing it put with upbeat and bopy music makes it all seem much less scar...

2/15/2018 Thoughts on the last scene of Hamlet

   I know this is probably an unpopular opinion but the ending to Hamlet with the death of the King, Queen, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Laertes, and Hamlet felt to abrupt. I wish that the deaths could have been more individualized instead of all grouped together at the same time. I wanted to hear more about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern actually died. I also feel like Laertes death was unnecessary the only wrong that he did was plan hamlets murder but that was revenge/justice for the deaths of Ophelia and Polonius that Hamlet caused leaving Laertes alone with no close family, and Laertes didn’t even plan hamlets murder all on his own Claudius was pushing him towards it the whole time. Also I did not enjoy that Hamlet left Horatio to clean up his mess, out of all the unnecessary deaths that happened in that scene Horatio should have been able to join in if he really wanted to.  

2/8/2018 Hamlet post 1

Act 4 scene 5 In this scene Ophelia walks in to the room crazed looking, she instantly throws everyone aback at her appearance. Which makes you instantly pity her and made me prepare myself for however she decides to act or anything she’s about to say, to be completely jibersh. The next thing she does is she starts to sing songs that they all know but she mixes up the words and everyone knows she’s not singing it right. I think that was Ophelias way of saying how she feels about everything that has happened to her recently. She refers at one point to the situation with her and Hamlet and cries, and later in the song she gets it messed up and ends up taking about her her father’s death and how it was not handled correctly. I really enjoyed this scene. I liked seeing some more of Ophelia’s character development.