Final Blogpost

Coming into this class, I didn’t really know what I was anticipating. Poetry has been one of the only
forms of artistic expression that I’ve managed to avoid, and this class was my first true exposure to
what it’s like outside of the textbook definition that I had to learn in high school. I had thought that with
each unit I would be spending countless hours of my day counting syllables and checking my meter
in order to get the perfectly pristine and correct poem. Luckily for me, I learned very quickly how wrong
I was. Not only did I find myself enjoying the artistic expression of poetry for the first time, I was also
fascinated to witness how other people chose to create poetry, and to see what qualities in a written
piece they value over others.

I also found it difficult to be able to define what qualifies as good poetry. For example, during the
surrealist poem unit, I found myself completely baffled as to why anyone would read 4 pages worth
of nonsense and qualify it as a quality and groundbreaking piece of writing. However, in that same
breath, I found myself being able to analyze the elements of it that people seemed to have enjoyed
and was able to extract from it things from it that I enjoyed myself. I soon learned to release many
of my inhibitions I had about writing poetry, and many of the worries I had about trying to create an
academically pristine work of writing, and began creating poems that I enjoyed in the different formats
we’ve learned about. So much so that for my final project I chose to create poetry on origami,
partially because I enjoyed the sense of fragility and the finality of the final piece, but also because
I simply loved the idea of creating poems about what the poem is shaped of.

From a more academic standpoint, I found myself fascinated by the poets and artists we learned
about who created art simply for the sake of creating art. I was baffled by this massive community
of artists, musicians, and poets who spent their days living purely for the sake of artistic expression.
While many of them, I must admit, seemed so abstract in their intentions that at times I couldn’t
understand why they would produce the things they did, the efforts of so many poets were so valuable
in defining what art means across the globe. I learned that art and poetry have the power to affect
massive populations of people and become the catalyst for very real and genuine change, which is
something that I’ve heard about, but had never truly witnessed until this class with individuals like
Allen Ginsberg and Saul Williams.

Artists today have an important role in several aspects in our lives. As previously mentioned,
they often act as a voice for many in terms of politics and social issues, as they create art that
resonates and translates many issues for the masses. Through poetry slams, political protests,
and many other widely public expressions of word, it’s clear that artists’ voices have the power to
resonate deeply and powerfully, and can create genuine change in the world. In addition, artists’
work saturate every form of media that we see. They have the task of translating everything in the
world into something tangible and easily accessed. They will take broad concepts we encounter every
day and condense them into movies, tv shows, novels, children’s books, and so many other forms
of media that break down what it is to be human. Artists have the task of creating an outlet for millions
of people, creating media that allows us to be distracted by our everyday routine and spark our
own imagination into other worlds.

In conclusion, this class allowed me to finally understand the value of artistic expression.
Whether it be for the sake of others, or just for the sake of artistic expression, I found myself
genuinely enjoying reading, writing, and sharing my poetry with others for the first time in my life.
I also learned to value artists’ impact on the world, not only in the artistic sense, but in the political,
cultural, and social sense as well. Each unit allowed me to explore how I view the world artistically,
and gave me the chance to witness how others who came before me do as well. I’ve valued my time
in this class, and am grateful I got the chance to experience the connection between the visual and
written arts for the first time.