Journal 3 Mika Newell

The 2 ideas that stuck out most to me were Hugo's ideas that assumptions lie behind the work of all writers and his idea that you should write like there is no reader. The "write like there is no reader idea is interesting because I did not expect to ever hear that, yet it actually does make sense.  His reasoning behind this idea is that "Once you have the information, the words seem unimportant" (Hugo, 11). When writing, you want your audience to value and enjoy your use of language rather than just sift through it for information. Hugo's idea of assumption stuck out to me also. I never realized how many assumptions writers used until reading this. But, if you think about it, writing would be nearly impossible without at least a few assumptions. Hugo also pointed out how important it is for writers to stick with the assumptions they make. "It is important that a poet not question his/her assumptions, at least not in the middle of composition" (Hugo, 19). Making assumptions is especially important when writing poems, where less background information is included. The question I want to ask is why does Hugo say the weirder the assumption is, the better?


I have honestly learned a lot more from writing my own poetry than I have from reading about poetry. I have learned a lot from reading the poetry of others becuase it opened my mind up to new possibilities in poetry. Reading in the textbook about how to write poetry was helpful in some ways, though. I learned about punctuation commonly used in poetry such as enjambments, which I used in my poems. I also learned different terms to describe the quality of poetry.

My process of creating a poem really depends a lot on which type of poem I want to create. I never write poetry outside of a school setting, so usually the overall type of poem I write is assigned to me. I really enjoyed writing the found poem, for example. It was really fun and interesting to take pieces of language I enjoyed and putting them together to make one unified poem. At first, punctuation was a struggle for me, because I had no idea where to put line breaks and enjambments. However, I found that if I wrote the poem then went back through it and added the punctuation where it sounded like it belonged, that helped a lot.