The reading and writing assignments are both two different things to me. The close readings and literary analyses are something I feel confident in writing and I don't have any noticeable difficulty with completing them. The reading assignments vary. Some of the readings throughout the class are difficult for me to try and get into while others are at least tolerable. It can take a lot more time for me to read depending on how interested I am in the reading.
For example, trying to read through "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth was a nightmare. It just felt like it wouldn't end. It was only three and a half pages long but it dragged on for so long. It's probably just a bias I have against poems that worship scenes of beauty and long poems that don't move from a single subject. After the first two large stanzas on the first page I couldn't help but wonder how long he could realistically fantasize about this place. I also don't feel like he lacks the talent to do so, but I really wish he would have condensed his thoughts a lot more since most of the content in the poem felt redundant.
Poem 1129 by Emily Dickinson on the other hand was a great read. I mentioned in my reading notes for Emily Dickinson's poems that I'm not normally a fan of her works. I don't dislike her writing, I just typically don't like it either. It just exists. But Poem 119 was really enjoyable. I was engaged from the first line. I'm probably being biased since this poem was short and I feel like my best poems are usually short as well. When I write poems, they average about 10 to 30 lines. Rarely ever do I write a poem longer than a page. But when it comes to poetry, I'm one of those people that believe poems should be concise unless the amount of content in the poem requires a larger amount of writing to do it justice. Emily Dickinson definitely did a lot with just 8 lines in Poem 1129. I was able to understand the message she was trying to share about the way people view death and think about the ways that different people process the idea of dying and their beliefs around it. I'm not one to be fascinated by death since I'd like to live as long a life as possible, but this poem was just so well written and interesting.
My reading notes are helping me a lot with my story posts since I take way more notes than I actually end up managing to use. I practically type up a summary of every important event or detail that I feel is worth noting in a bullet point format with page numbers so I can read through them and remember how the story went. The page numbers help me if I need specific quotes to make a point or explain my thoughts. These notes do get tiresome though. I move away from this style of note-taking when it comes to the poetry. My notes for poetry feel more like analyses than notes with the exception of William Wordsworth's poems but I don't want to rant about him again.
I wasn't exactly satisfied with the end result of my class project because I confused myself somewhere along the way and was under the impression that we had one more week to finalize our projects. I know there's still things I wanted to add into my project. Ignoring that, I do feel like I relearned a lot of things that I had forgotten about writing thanks to the revisions that I did. I feel as if I have a stronger grasp on how to organize and structure my projects better. This should definitely help me with our upcoming projects.
I don't feel like I've had any accomplishments worth praising in this class. All of my work in this class feels satisfactory to me which is good and all, but I don't feel like anything I've written really stands out in a way where I can pick something and say "this is the best thing I've written in this class." Maybe I'll finish an assignment before the end of the semester that I feel proud of and maybe I won't. If I don't, maybe that just means I don't care much for any writing I do that isn't poetry or fiction.
Moving forward I think there's at least a few things that I could do to get the most out of this class. I should probably look at my classmates' notes when it comes to readings that I didn't understand well or struggled with. Or maybe their notes and analyses can change my opinion when it comes to writings that I didn't particularly like.
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