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Core Concepts Reflection

This activity was one of my favorite activities from this class so far. I enjoyed looking at

each poem with a different lens, as it helped me shape my understanding of writing. Before, I

would have only chosen to see through one perspective. I would have taken the most prominent

theme and only thought about that one thing. However, now I can take a poem and reflect on it

through many different ideas. I think the best concepts we went through was Transformation and

Perspective. Transformation made me look at a poem not from the standpoint of an unbiased

reader, but allowed me to reflect upon other stories and poems I have seen before. I looked at the

writing with the understanding of intertextuality, that the story I was reading was a part of a wide

web of stories. Perspective made me reflect upon who was telling the story. It made me wonder

about the other characters, and ask why they were not the chosen narrators. Everything the

authors did had a purpose, and slowly but surely I was learning how to look for those hints. I did,

however, find culture the most challenging concept. I found it took a deep understanding of the

poem or a fine tuned eye to pick out the exact culture of some poems. Not always in the

characters, but also in the author. They expressed their culture through their words, their choices,

their identified objects, but to me that was hard to pinpoint.

In the end, however, I found there were no poems that did not work with their concept.

That was a very strange realization to me. Every poem was completely different to one another,

and yet they worked in the same way. The lenses covered each and every word these authors had

put together. The wide web just got a whole lot bigger. That includes the connection between

each concept, they too seemed to work with each other and sometimes overlapped. For example,
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creativity and communication. These two concepts work with imagery involved with word

choice. They share the same question, what can we make the reader visualize our idea?

This activity will stay with me, and I will keep it in mind as we move forward in the

class. Whenever we are given a poem, article, book, etc, I will not look at it from one lens, but

from as many as it takes to fully grasp the ideas the author wished to convey.