#310 words

I am very pleased with our product. In creating the product throughout the planning stages it forced me to review the stories I’ve previously read to the point where I knew them very well, and listening to my teammates’ portions of the podcast helped me understand stories I did not spend as much time analyzing. I listened to it the morning of the exam and it really helped center and focus me and jog my memory in some cases. I think that was a major success, that the product could be used to aid in studying very easily. A possible shortcorming is how specific it is to the thesis we chose but that was part of the prompt. For example I felt like a had a variety of stories I knew certain details about for different possible prompts and some of those coincided with the prompt and some of those stories did not. But the project helped me in learning between 10-12 stories in total about 3 from each author that I felt very confident in talking about, paraphrasing and describing.

“I Love You Sweatheart” by Thomas Lux Stylistically I love this poem. It has all these punctuation marks you’re advised against in formal writing and that tend to feel natural to me. It reads the way he meant it to sound. Inside the parenthesis an off thecuff kind of after thought. Something you think but maybe are unsure about and shouldn’t say. The question marks bring in the tone of mockery and commentating confusion. You have Lopate’s contrariety within, the mocking tone with the sentimental story. It feels very conversational and it’s really humorous. I don’t know, just seeing this writing style made me happy, since it looked so similar to how I write to try to convey my tone. I understand thats probably not very important, but it’s something that jumped out at me. The points that were discussed in class were mostly speculation behind the message or purpose. Was he reflecting on something he might do? Making fun of that man in particular? Or all men who try to be romantic and sweet, but inevitably make a mistake, perhaps and endearing one, but a mistake nonetheless? I definitely enjoyed this poem. I miss looking at poetry in class. I enjoy class discussions on poetry or "profound" prose. I'm glad that this exercise gave me a new poet to look into and read works by, perhaps become obsessed with (who knows!?) but  i don't like how it made me remember just how much I miss studying poetry in class. Hamlet cannot come soon enough. I'm kind of planning to write my "go big" on poetry or Hamlet and Shakespeare's methods as used in Hamlet, but we've yet to get there. I hate feeling like I'm just waiting for these things to happen, but it's where I'm at– it's my current state of mind. I've gotten very off the origianly topic so I suppose I'll stop now.