Journal Four Anthony Fernandez

Part One:

Of the ideas presented in chapter 8, it was his comment of page 76 where he comments on beggars. It seemed like a cold-hearted thing to say whether or not it was true. That said, after looking at it for a while, it makes sense. After all, what is the subject of a decent and moving poem when your muse goes from sad and destitute to happy and carefree. You could still do something with it, but it would probably not end well.

As for chapter 9, I found the most interesting part to be was on page 101 when he commented on how the business and university views of his job where a bit different from each other. As a guy whose worked a job and gone to school at the same time for years now, I can understand what he is going through to an extent. It's hard to be accepted by all around you. At best, all you can do is be happy with yourself.

Part Two:

As a critic, it was really hard to do it right. The guidelines of the workshops meant that I had to look at everyone’s poems and write what I liked and what could use some work. For all intents and purposes and without really hesitating in the least, I can honestly say that the second part of those guidelines was what really got me. You see, while there were plenty of times where something was seriously wrong, at least to me, and I had no trouble saying that, most of the poems I wound up reading were really very good and I couldn’t see anything wrong with them. Jeremiah’s poem is a perfect example of this. To me, it seemed like it was practically flawless, complete with excellent word choices and wonderfully balanced rhythm throughout the entire poem. To write constructive criticism about it, and all the others for that matter, I had to be like those nutty people you see on YouTube videos who see the tiniest of mistakes as an outrage and an utter failure to do anything good. That said, there were still times where certain things in the poems did not seem to add up or they were well done in the wrong place or wrong poem all together. At the end of the day, it did feel like all the bad things that I felt about the poems were more my personal feelings about it, which often times seemed to not be shared by the other critics in the class.

                In terms of being a person who was praised and criticized for my work, I had mixed feelings. When they were praising my work, it felt really good. In most aspects, the poem I had created was one of those that I was just rattling of the first thing that I could think of that had deep emotion in it. I was pleasantly surprised that most of the class, especially the teacher, thought that the language was very creative and brought very pronounced pictures to mind. That being said, most of the criticisms that I got were primarily centered around the same thing: What was the poem about? It was a perfectly understandable feeling. After all, when I wrote it, I knew exactly who Socks was. I had had him as a pet for years and he had been special to me. When I handed in the poem, I knew most people would probably not be able to figure that Socks was a cat, but that did not matter to me since it was special to me and in the end that’s all that matters. Honestly though, the early prototypes of the poem had me using the name of dog I used to have to, but I took it out knowing that just having Sock’s name in the poem was already enough to make people scratch their heads as it is. Besides all that, I didn’t purposely make every line capitalized at the beginning. That was just how the computer did it and I thought it looked nice enough to leave it be.

FYI this is 518 words.