My Own Poetry

1^st Poem: Sonnet

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

     TO HATERS, DEAF EARS

     There will always be those ones,

     Who hated you yesterday, who hate you today,

     To them, never pay attention, not once,

     For their hate won’t go away.

     Haters tend to criticize,

     What they themselves cannot achieve.

     And when you obtain a cherished prize,

     Your success they cannot conceive.

     Just keep on minding your business,

     Don’t be disturbed by their opinions,

     Everyone else is a witness,

     Of your undeniable dominion.

     Don’t let them conquer your grit,

     And above all, don’t ever quit.

--JJ Hernández

1) What was most challenging about writing this poem?  What might you do differently in the future?   

The most difficult part of this poem wasn’t actually finding rhyming words but creating rhythm within the poem and finding ways to connect ideas. In the future I might change the scheme of the poem or the type of poem itself.

2) What devices do you employ?  Did you do this consciously?  Why did you make those choices?

I used mostly apostrophe consciously, I tried to appeal to all the readers from a 1^st person perspective. I also altered the logical order of sentences to create a better sense of thoughtful writing.

3) What are your overall opinions of the poem you wrote?  Are you satisfied with it?  Why or why not? 

I think my first poem was pretty good, considering is written by me, and I’m happy with my own work. Definitely the stronger poem of the two I wrote.

2^nd Poem: Acrostic

     PATH TO GREATNESS

     Pride we have to take in ourselves,

     Above everyone else we must rise,

     To prove we are truly special,

     Humble and with exceptional drive.

     Triumph isn’t easily achieved,

     One has to want it badly enough for it to be seized.

     Give in we never must.

     Rebound from failure,

     Eager to prove wrong those who doubted us,

     And of being our own savior.

     The reward is proportional to the sacrifice,

     Never those who didn’t put in plenty of hours,

     Earned through grit a big prize.

     Should we then push ourselves further?

     Should we then work harder?

--JJ Hernández

1) What was most challenging about writing this poem?  What might you do differently in the future?   

The most challenging part of writing this poem was finding words that both rhymed and made sense within the sentence. In the future I could try to tweak some of my ideas to match my words instead of words to match ideas.

2) What devices do you employ?  Did you do this consciously?  Why did you make those choices?

I also altered the order of words within sentences to ‘sound more poetic’, and used apostrophe again to make the poem more relatable and personal for the reader.

3) What are your overall opinions of the poem you wrote?  Are you satisfied with it?  Why or why not? 

I don’t think this poem was that good, to be honest I think I complicated myself too much and wasn’t able to quite make it as good as I might have been able to if I had an easier acrostic.

"Invictus"--W.E. Henley (Favorite Poem Project)

Here I leave the link to my YouTube video review of "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley. I really enjoyed the poem and making the video too, hope you like it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9hrIjywOEg

Comparison “We Real Cool” and “Dance with the Devil”

     The poem “We Real Cool”, by Gwendolyn Brooks, and the song “Dance with the Devil”, by Immortal Technique, both tell the stories of Young, promising men who, to appear ‘cool’ and ‘evil’, took a bad route. In the case of the song this route eventually leads to the disastrous death of the protagonist, Billy, while in the poem, it’s just foreshadowing this yet avoidable destiny of a hedonistic and illicit lifestyle. In the poem, Brooks shows this desire to be cool by explicitly writing “We real cool. We / Left school. We”. In the song’s case, Immortal Technique sings “so hel felt the need (Billy) to prove to everyone he was evil” and “dropped out of school to sell weed” proving that Billy was no more than a kid.

     Another topic which both the poem and the song discuss is appearances and façades. Though they appear to be dangerous thugs, these men are just a bunch of soft cowards, pretending to be something they’re not. In the poem the men are playing pool during school time, meaning they either dropped out school or are skipping classes, but then the author adds the verse “we thin gin. We” (they put water to soften the taste of Gin) which remarks that these men are not truly ‘cool’ or ‘tough’. In the song Billy tries to join a gang of so called ‘tough men’, but to do so he needs to rape a woman. Forcing a woman, who is no match (physically) for a gang of men, is not acting like tough men, but rather as coward, and arrogant. A true man would match against other men, and not against defenseless individuals. The singer emphasizes this aspect of lack of manhood by singing “and crying out to the sky (Billy) cause he was lonely and scared”, which demonstrates that in the end, Billy is just a pretender, trying to look evil and tough, though he is just a kid.

• Another similarity I found interesting, but that it’s not worth a whole paragraph, is that both the 7 men in the poem and Billy dropped out or left school.