Adi Chaham Week 1: “Poem for the First Day of the Poetry Unit in Language Arts Class” by Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre

 

Adi Chaham Week 1: “Poem for the First Day of the Poetry Unit in Language Arts Class” https://guante.info/2022/03/29/languagearts/

    The poem, “Poem for the Poetry Unit in Language Arts Class”, is a relatable poem for most teenagers and brings kids, such as myself, to a bit of a comfort zone. For this assignment, I went through about 20-25 different people on the list of poets to find one that I felt most connected to, most interested me and that I understood. Finally, I found Mr.Myhre and his untraditional poems. As I looked through other poems, I noticed that Mr.Mhyre’s poems in specific, were longer than most and had a different structure to them. Rather than being in stanzas or rhyming, his are in paragraph form and do not rhyme. 

As I continued reading the poem, I realized the deeper meaning behind his untraditional type of poetry. This poem specifically, reminds students, such as myself who don't particularly love poems, that poems don’t need to be the traditional idea of what a poem looks like. Myrhe explains that it doesn’t matter “whether [the poem] rhymes or not” or whether “it gets a good grade or not” as long as it means “something to you”. As someone who finds most poems extremely hard to understand partly because of the way they are structured, I found what Myrhe had to say as extremely powerful.  

Throughout the poem, the poet speaks as if he is speaking to you, the reader, he is relatable and unlike other poems, makes his poems easier to understand because he is aware of the fact that most of those that don’t like poems, don’t like them because of their inability to understand the poem. The poem speaks of the need to write a poem for a language arts class as a person who doesn’t like poems. This poem in particular related to my current experience in this class because, as we all know, since we are doing it, we must find poems and try to understand them and maybe throughout the year, we will need to write our own and as I mentioned above, I don’t like poems. Towards the middle, the poet gives a sort of question to the audience in which of course, he himself answers; however, the answer to the question gives readers the opportunity to really understand that “no matter how beautiful, or colorful, or well-constructed the balloon itself is, none of that makes it fly. But at the end of the day, all that matters is not how nice it looks, not its structure but its meaning to you.” The poet writes this in particular to persuade kids like myself that poetry doesn;t have a strict set of rules or regulations, it’s what the writer makes it. 

During the poem, the poet connects the idea of students disliking the idea of writing poems to the fact that he doesn’t like the sun. However, despite not liking the sun, he must live with it and make the best of it just as students who need to write or, like myself, read poems must make the most out of it. 

Personally, as much as I don’t like poems due to the fact that I can’t understand them, I enjoyed this poem very much and changed my overall perspective on poems. It was not difficult to understand yet the message behind it was deep. Furthermore, it felt as if the poet spoke directly to me by using words such as “you” and by relating to teenagers through using less formal speech such as “corny”. In addition, he gave some great advice as to the fact that a poem can have so many elements, so many meanings and so many different things one could include in their poem that although may not seem traditional, are accepted.