Sitting in Poetry Class

Not listening and not doing the German project that was due yesterday. Only thing new about all this today is that my prof got a haircut. I'm not sure how finals are going to work out next week for this class. We're required to memorize poems to use as examples, define a bunch of literary terms we never actually learned about and talk about time periods and authors we sort of learned about. I believe the exam is three hours long...just long enough to prolong my agony and suffering that this class has inflicted on me all year long. The prof seems like a nice guy, but he is too monotone, and seriously, no matter how you look at it, a collection of random words with lines and circles all over the place do not qualify as lecture notes.

I wasn't looking forward to poetry in the first place. When I thought of poets I thought of moody teenagers and fluttery old men ranting about sappy love. After starting the class, I still thought that. Until I took learning into my own hands and started looking at poems that interested me, I didn't have any desire to read poetry. First poet that gave me some faith in the genre is Robert Browning. God he's hilarious, and very descriptive. Then there's James Wright , Gregory Corso and Wole Soyinka, all of whom I really enjoy reading. First poem I actually enjoyed was "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke.

Here's a list of the poems by these authors that improved my opinions of poetry:

"Marriage" - Gregory Corso - http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1570.html

"Telephone Conversation" - Wole Soyinka - http://www.k-state.edu/english/westmank/spring_00/SOYINKA.html

"Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem" - James Wright - http://notwhatyouthink.org/forum/index.php?action=printpage%3Btopic=168.0

"The Waking" - Theodore Roethke - http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/104.html

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" - Robert Browning - http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rbrowning/bl-rbrown-childe.htm