Poetry People

[ChrisH]

Originally posted by MissInformation
Not to argue with you, because I agree, sometimes things are over analyzed... but poets, novelists, songwriters, these people are word engineers. An English teacher's responsibility is to explain how their structures are put together, what makes them work and why they work. Symbolism can be a nuisance, but it can also be interesting and make you look at something a bit differently. And being able to see something from different view points is a good skill to have in any field.

And to completely show I've gone off the deep-end, compare this past year's game to a poem. So there's this poem called Stack-attack and all of these teams were given the task of interpreting it and figuring it out. Which they did, but funny thing is some of them agreed on it and built robots that were a lot alike, but some came up with completely different answers for it and their robots reflect that. Now, if all the robots that won the competitions were close to the same thing, then they most likely were on to something about what that silly Stack-Attack poem meant. Did seeing so many different robots lessen your enjoyment of the game? Of course, I do realize poetry is not a robot game, words and machines are two different things and not all people love words the way I do (but that's o.k., because I can't stand math ) but they are not completely separate.

We are using symbolism to communicate right now. Human beings are symbolic processors, not binary processors. What is a word but a symbol to represent a concept?

In writing, poetry, songs and graphic arts of all sorts, the use of widely understood symbols can greatly magnify the impact of the work. Symbols can communicate at a level deeper than words. But only if the symbol is widely understood and used appropriately to make the point. Studying the symbology of the masters shows you both what can be achieved and how to achieve it.

On the other hand much of the impact is lost when the audience no longer recognizes the symbols. That is why we sometimes have trouble understanding writers from long ago, their symbolic language is somewhat different. Kind of like trying to understand someone who speaks a different dialect.

I like the picture of authors as word engineers, a very apt picture especially for this group. Your comparison of a robot game to a poem was dead on.

Any comments Amber H?