Hey all! Hope everyone had a great break and ate lots of good food :) I wanted to reflect a little on the activity that we did near the end of class today when we discussed the importance of the first and last lines of poems. It is something that I think we have mentioned before and I think it's quite interesting. Many poets, including myself, try and drive an image or idea home with a stinger at the end, or perhaps a circular ending bring us back up to where we stared. Some artists may bring up a totally new idea at the end of their poem to stay our thoughts in other directions. Whatever the artist chooses to do however, what I have found is that you can tell a lot about a poem through just the first and last line. For example today, MacLeish ends his poem with "A poem should not mean/ But be.", Ashbery ends with "The poem is you" and O'Hara begins with "I am not a painter, I am a poet.". All of these examples bring us into what the ideas that these poets are trying to portray in their poems.

I thought it was such a fun activity to look through the index and pick out first lines/titles that we liked and link them together. It is always fun to take the ideas/words of someone else and put another meaning to them because of the way they are put together. I thought the last activity was cool too by taking the first and last line of a poem that we like and then swapping them and filling the middle with our own thoughts. It is amazing how many different variations we can come up with the same words when we put our own spin on it...that's poetry I guess!