Honors 345: The Triggering Town

 

First off, this class was amazing. Frances McCue is an amazing professor and I took this class because my friend strongly recommended it to me. She wasn't wrong. I also chose to take it because it was about poetry, and I although I went into the class thinking I would be horrible at writing poetry, I've learned that it's virtually impossible to go wrong when writing poetry if you give it your best effort and put your heart into it.

 

The part I enjoyed the most about this class was our Poetry Mondays, where we were given a prompt and we would create a poem based on that prompt. It was fun, made me think, and I came up with some poems that I really enjoyed. In addition, we wrote them by hand, which was tiring but just made me feel like it was more traditional and appropriate. The thought process of poetry involves lots of revision, and I'm proud to say that my notebook is filled with scribbles and crossed out lines; it's messy but it's a good kind of messy. If we had been typing our poems, no one would have saw our thought process and all we wouldn't have been able to re-arrange lines and make revisions as easily.

 

We also had a group project, which was very different from the projects I am used to. After two quarters in the business school, group project to me meant going to class in business casual/professional, make a Powerpoint, and present with a formal tone. In The Triggering Town, Frances banned boring presentations with just a PowerPoint. We were to create groups based on our interest in different poets, and the group members I found were all interested in less-recognized, ethnic poets. We ultimately chose to focus on two poets, Cathy Song and Wang Ping, because sadly, there just wasn't enough information to do an entire presentation on one. I loved how much fun and creativity we were able to have with this project, which is something you will probably never see in a Foster School presentation. We chose a talk show format and parodied Oprah's Book Club, incorporating the poets' biography, analyses of their poems, and also a poetry reading. I actually really wish that I had asked someone to record it for me, but it will definitely be a long-lasting memory.

 

I've attached one of my favorite poems below and have included my revision process as well. For this partcular poem, we were asked to write 10 things that we were thinking about, and then rearrange/slightly modify them to create a poem.