After the disappointment I experienced from receiving the results of my second CAT, I realised that the source of my failure was the very beginning of my passage. The intro was poorly worded and wasn’t that definitive, it also didn’t go fully into depth on the topic of “so what”. This lead to the rest of my work being without aim, and overall didn’t have a cohesive message. So from this learning, I thought to try redo my intro, with a bit more of an objective that would pave a clear path for the -hypothetical coming paragraphs.

The free verse poem “Museum” by WIslawa Szymborska, is a highly technical piece of literature. It dictates the journey of a woman, most likely Szymborska, walking through a museum and noting the relics of the past that lay before her. Through this poem Szymborska uses a long running metaphor alongside heavy personification of these items, expressing them to have once held these grand human traits: Love, rage and joy. This metonymic personification is used in tandem with a constantly repeating diction and tone to convey the loss of these traits, and therefore the loss of humanity through time. Even though for the majority of the poem, Szymborska conveys a sense of existential dread due to time’s inevitable conquering of humanity, in the last stanza, through her use of a joyish waltz like metre and expressive tone, she celebrates human’s paradoxical ability to blissfully continue struggling. 

This is some of my annotations I did in my second CAT. This CAT is based on an unseen poem, and frankly I believe I did really really bad. In the planning stage I didn’t use a lot of the annotations I did to form a coherent structure for my writing. Leading to my writing being sloppy and poorly worded.

As one of the culminations of our poetry work, one of our tests was us actually having to create a poem. Using a very strict poetic structure, called a sestina. In a sestina, each stanza is 6 lines, except for one being only 3 lines. Also the last words of each stanza is repeated in s specific order.

Below is my stanza. Although I feel like I really liked what I did with it. After seeing it graded, I realised I focused on constructing a narrative much more than thinking how to creatively use poetic techniques. The narrative was supposed to be that of an estranged father, who lost his son. This causes him great guilt, so he starts manifesting his child in his dreams, yet signs of his failure as a father keep peeping through. Such as his fixation on his sparse knowledge of his son, seen through the tuna, and him forgetting the form of his favorite chair. I felt really proud of this narrative, yet I feel like I didn’t adhere to the rubric as much, which asked for more of an advanced approach through technique.

Well into the poetry unit, we have fixated on a very prominent poet: Wislawa Szymborska. A polish poet, whose many works delve into the metaphysical genre our curriculum seems to be gravitating towards. Personally I really like her work so far. Very rarely have I seen a poet who is able to express themselves so thoroughly through poetic techniques. Through this she is able to maintain an extremely captivating brevity in her words, that is really remarkable.

Below is a little bit of annotating I did on one of my favorite poems of hers.

We started poetry with some work on the basics of analysing a poem. We also started looking at metaphysical poetry through a work by John Donne

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