5-18-09

I finished reading most of the Def Poetry Jam poems and I think they are really good. Most of the poems are very real and you can tell a lot of them come from the heart. I like the fact that it reminds me a lot of rap which we learned today fits well with poetry. One thing that bothered me a little was some of the words used like cat, and a few others that we wouldn't normally say. At first I thought the poets were teens our age and that is what I pictured before realizing they weren't. When I first opened the book I just wanted to look at it and I started reading Poetri's poems. These were Urges, End Of Story and If I Ever Lost You. This was in the section after the brief character summary. These were more serious poems and I didn't acknowledge him until later on. After I started reading the play/poems from the start I kept note of the ones I liked. I liked the ones that were not as personal and were somewhat funny which turned out to be Poetri's poems. He wrote Poems like Money, Dating Myself and Krispy Kream. These poems were very funny but he even admits that he was serious when writing them. The next day we learned that it was better to hear the poem the way it was read. So I went on youtube.com and checked some of his videos. I even found another poem I liked called "Monsters" which also had a deeper meaning to it. I have to be honest though it was not what I expected. I expected a deeper voice and a tougher way of saying the poems. He sounded more like a stand up comedian which I liked allot because I like stand up comedy. If its his style then I like it but it could be how all the poets presented their poems on the stage. As I was reading, another poet that I was interested in was Beau. He seems like he has a huge ego but I liked his poems. I pictured him yelling them out which is why I was interested in them. One poem that I liked in the book was "Shine" by Lemon on page 41. It is about a black man who managed to swim to Harlem during the Titanic while the other white passengers drowned. This sort of reminds me of "I Too Sing America" by Langston Hughes. The very first sentence even says "while white America sings". In fact I saw allot of poems that reminded me of Hughes and even Maya Angelou. I have not liked a lot of poetry before this class but I'm glad I got to read these types of poems which are not so boring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht9lB-hebJw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFhFaRKVpTY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNlVNhTBu-A