Kwame Alexander is an author that I've really come to respect, his work inspired a lot of my own in terms of voice and flow and style.
The very first thing I learned in the reading of this book is that poetry is a very fluid and abstract concept. There aren't any rules to free-verse poetry, and if there are they were broken when this book was published. The style of this book made me realize that you can really do whatever you want when writing, there are so many ways to get a point across, have your writing serve a purpose, and everything else. Since reading this book I've tried being experimental with my writing because after finishing it I didn't want to read anything else. This was it, I'd seen all I needed to see.
"Basketball Rule #10
A loss is inevitable, like snow in winter. True champions learn to dance through the storm."
The next thing I saw in this book was the incorporation of a plot/story line in poetry, which I hadn't seen in a poetry book before. This book progressed like a regular book, which I thought was a very interesting concept. I didn't know something like that was allowed, to have poems follow a comprehensive story that was interesting and compelling to read. That really opened my eyes to all of the possibilities there are in composing different kinds of poems.
One more thing I learned from this book was how to show the dynamics of a family. The author made it very explicit that the family felt love for each other while still having minor external conflicts, and I think that's something that's very hard to do while not explicitly stating it and through textual clues and whatnot. One thing I love to write about is family, so that's something that I really tried to take into account in my own writing. I read over the pages sometimes for twenty minutes trying to understand how he made me feel the love the father felt without having the father actually tell his boys he loved them.
The very first thing I learned in the reading of this book is that poetry is a very fluid and abstract concept. There aren't any rules to free-verse poetry, and if there are they were broken when this book was published. The style of this book made me realize that you can really do whatever you want when writing, there are so many ways to get a point across, have your writing serve a purpose, and everything else. Since reading this book I've tried being experimental with my writing because after finishing it I didn't want to read anything else. This was it, I'd seen all I needed to see.
"Basketball Rule #10
A loss is inevitable,
like snow in winter.
True champions
learn
to dance
through
the storm."
The next thing I saw in this book was the incorporation of a plot/story line in poetry, which I hadn't seen in a poetry book before. This book progressed like a regular book, which I thought was a very interesting concept. I didn't know something like that was allowed, to have poems follow a comprehensive story that was interesting and compelling to read. That really opened my eyes to all of the possibilities there are in composing different kinds of poems.
One more thing I learned from this book was how to show the dynamics of a family. The author made it very explicit that the family felt love for each other while still having minor external conflicts, and I think that's something that's very hard to do while not explicitly stating it and through textual clues and whatnot. One thing I love to write about is family, so that's something that I really tried to take into account in my own writing. I read over the pages sometimes for twenty minutes trying to understand how he made me feel the love the father felt without having the father actually tell his boys he loved them.