Voices from the Poet-Sea
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About this ebook
Following the successful “Windows to the Teenage Soul,” “A Cup of Poetea,” “Where the Poetree Grows,” and last year’s “No One Stanza-Lone,” Los Gatos High School has constructed another masterpiece. With the help of ebook publisher Smashwords, more than 175 students have put together a poetic compilation of comic relief, tear-jerking tragedies, and insights into the teenage mind. Led by English teachers Tonya McQuade, Kathleen Wehr, and Zachary Davidson-Wilson, the English 9 Honors classes have designed and edited “Voices from the Poet-Sea” into a beautiful collection of poetry, artwork, and team explanations of the process they followed. You can purchase this incredible collection and help the 9th grade students raise funds for the LGHS Class of 2021.
LGHS English 9H Class of 2021
"LGHS English 9H Class of 2021" includes eight English 9 Honors classes, made up of approximately 175 students, taught by English teachers Tonya McQuade, Kathleen Wehr, and Zachary Davison-Wilson at Los Gatos High School in Los Gatos, CA.
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Voices from the Poet-Sea - LGHS English 9H Class of 2021
Artwork by Brandon Virk
A Jumbled Expression of the Human Soul
By Quinn Lazear
What is Poetry?
Is there an answer?
Any cliché hallmark card answer would say that poetry is no one thing
Poetry is a collection of thoughts and voices together in a song
Poetry is an emotion or a riddle
I have learned poetry is more than just meaningful words
Poetry is music and music is poetry
Poetry is a song without the notes
A way to betray the human soul without exerting the hands
A lazy man's way to tell a story
Emote something he wants to share with any who are willing to listen
Poetry is an ocean of waves and sequences and creations
With a tide of positive and negative topics
And waves of patterns and rhymes
And a never dying presence of life and energy
I don’t write poetry
I write know-it-all b.s. that makes a person think
I write the music in my head without the rhythmic talent
What do you write?
That is why there is no answer to poetry
Poetry is the purest most jumbled expression of the human soul. Since I was little, I’ve always loved music. My dad told me I would sit in the car and bounce to the rhythms as a baby. As I aged, I started to acknowledge the words behind the notes. It wasn’t until ninth grade English class that I finally realized that the lyrics I joyfully repeated over and over again was poetry. I was completely oblivious that all along I was taking apart poetry and not just song lyrics. The songs I’ve always loved now had many more reasons to be loved.
I learned poetry can be deceiving. It can sound happy and be the total opposite. However, throughout this entire unit, I’ve only learned that people can be just as deceiving as their poetry. Poetry can be written both about the internal desires of the soul and the flaws in the same writing. No one can read a poem and understand its full meaning without being the writer themselves. Poetry is deceiving music.
The Puzzle Pieces of Our Lives
By Adrina Tang
When we were little, poetry was the bane of our existence. In elementary school, teachers would show us poems that seemed to us merely incomprehensible words fitted together to create something we needed to interpret but didn’t have a clue where to start. And, to some extent, some poems still are. However, now we know they can be so much more than that. A poem can be a piece of someone –– a little window into the writer’s thoughts, their ideas, and their values. Poetry makes people think, especially the poets themselves. Poems are like a work of art, painted with strokes of the author’s words, fitted together to form a masterpiece, and comprehensible for the people who truly take the effort to connect and understand it. Of all the different types of writing –– essays, short stories, flash fiction –– I think that poems are the most intimate, and often times also the hardest to share. But that is also part of their brilliance: once you do, it results in a great sense of connection and understanding.
Before this unit, poems were a rather unfamiliar realm in writing. I was both excited and nervous to explore them more intricately –– excited to find out whether poetry was truly something I could relate to, nervous to see whether I had an affinity for it or not, whether I had the ability to express what I wanted to. Now, after writing so many poems for homework and seeing the many different forms of poetry, poems are a representation of familiarity and comfort. While there are still many things I can learn and discover, poetry is no longer an uncertainty, and I have started to understand that poetry deals less with ability and more with ideas and expression.
In a poem, the message and the way it makes people feel when they read it is what truly makes it great. Some poems may contain the simplest words and a primitive format, but because it makes the reader think and feel in ways that make them remember its impact, these poems can be some of the greatest ever written. After this unit, I think that I’ve finally begun to understand what poetry is really about.
A Blizzard of Freedom
By Kamran Ostrum
Poetry is a language that one may be incredibly gifted at delivering, yet incompetent at understanding. I think of the language of poetry as a blizzard. Each poem is a snowflake, and none are exactly alike. Each word in the snowflake of a poem is a water molecule. Water is malleable and can take many forms, just like any given word, sentence, or stanza in a poem, which can be interpreted in an endless number of ways. Those people who can interpret poetry understand that it is a vastly complicated art, and even they cannot be sure of what an author is trying to convey. I love that poetry presents endless possibilities, that it allows one to use their imagination, and I love how no can tell me I am wrong or right in my opinions of the meaning of a poem.
I used to struggle with the endless blizzard of the language of poetry; before this unit, I could barely understand the true meaning of some of my own work. In my eighth-grade poetry unit, I realized that I was a decent author of poetry, yet it took me a significant amount of time to break down some of my own poems and understand what I was trying to convey. After this unit, I have learned how to appreciate that poetry is something that I can interpret differently than others. I can use my imagination to twist the complicated words of poetry into my opinion of the author's message. I have always looked for the correct answers in my life; because social norms and tradition suggest that the correct answer is eternally the right answer, which is why it used to be so challenging to interpret the mystery that poetry represents.
Most of the time, there isn’t a definitive right or wrong answer in poetry. The interpretation of any poem can be molded to what I believe is the message. To me, poetry is a place to let my imagination run wild; it is a vast snowstorm of language that I can finally write and understand. Poetry is a place where no one can mark me down for having the wrong answer. I used to think of poetry as a dull, complicated language, which I had no hope of understanding. After this unit, I can understand poetry, and it has become a place for me to allow my imagination to flow free, go against social norms of finding the right answer, and see the solution that suits me best. Poetry is no longer a seemingly meaningless struggle; it is now a blizzard of freedom.
Golden Honey
Viveca Pannell
Poetry.
That thick golden honey that feeds my ears.
I listen, still and waiting
For the glorious echoes that fly through all
The halls and rooms and parks.
It runs.
It glides.
It soars.
Poets with their pens can use ink.
Or they can use rhythm.
Or meter.
Or rhyme.
A poet’s arsenal consists of connotation,
Punctuation,
And metaphor.
Number one though,
The most important to the soul of poetry
Is choice. And passion.
With the rhythm, and the meter, and the rhyme,
Now I make sounds that have more meaning that feelings ever can.
Connected
Poetry reels in our senses
And blasts them to one blessed moment,
One eager thought,
One fleeting feeling.
And then I sigh,
With a satisfaction
That none may share
Or ever truly know.
And to think I thought poetry was garbage.
An Art Beyond Definition
By Alaina Fox
Poetry is an art beyond definition. Is there a single statement that can be applied to every poem without restricting the freedom of expression that poetry grants? No, each individual author shapes poems with their own rules or lack thereof, their own intents, and their own emotions. This absence of definition is what draws many people to poetry, either to read or to write it. There are countless forms and styles - haikus, limericks, sonnets, couplets, ballads, odes, acrostics, and so on - but free verse, in which the length, meter, and rhyme is left to the author to decide, is a popular form among many as well. By providing guidelines for those who prefer rules and allowing choices for the more independent, poetry welcomes those of all personalities to participate in its splendor. Beyond structure, poetry also invites topics of all sorts, from discussion of burdensome candor to nonsensical verses for humor.
Because of its broad reach and