Sunday 1 April 2012

Hello, Blogosphere. [BEDA: Day 1]

Whoa, so this is the updated Blogger.

It's so... very... white.

I think it's going to burn itself into my irises.

There's gotta be a setting to change that... somewhere... around here...

Nevermind. I'll look for it later.

Anyway, started a new blog. Other one had privacy issues, so I needed to start tabula rasa if I was going to register myself on the BlogHer.com NaBloPoMo for April.

A bit busy with exams coming up, so just wanted to post today, so I can, ya know, say I actually posted for Blog Every Day in April.

I guess I could cheat and type this up later and manually adjust the post date and time to make it look like I posted everyday.

But I don't really wanna. What's the point of saying you're gonna do something voluntarily and then cheat on it? That's like that cheap-ass guy on NaNoWriMo who 'finished' his 50k words on Day 1 by cut-'n-pasting entire chunks of text he found on other people's websites. What does he get out of that except bragging about doing something he never actually did? So he's not only a cheater, but he's also a plaigarist. It's an event to (a) challenge writers, (b) build community and (c) raise funds for a literacy charity and the guy cheats.

It seriously blows my mind.

Like how I googled 'Wii Fit' and one of the search results was a site with Wii Fit cheats.

Why cheat at something that would benefit your life if you actually didn't cheat at it?

Anyway, I digress. (You'll notice I do that alot.)

BlogHer.com's designated poetry as this year's BEDA theme. So I should say something about that before I sign off or go off on another irrelevant tangent.

Poetry.

Used to love poetry.

A First-year university English Lit course turned me off of poetry.

A Second-year university Creative Writing course taught me to hate it even more.

Turns out what the university says poetry is, isn't exactly what I first thought poetry was.

And it's definitely not what my aunt thinks it is. She saw me working on an essay on poetry for class, and she started going on about how I should be writing how the poem makes me feel.

Emotion has nothing to do with poetry.

Okay, maybe a little. Poetry can invoke emotion, but that's up to whoever's reading. But poetry itself isn't an entirely emotional exercise. It's not the whiny, rhyming 'oh-woe-is-me' scribbles that used to litter the margins of my high school class notes. It's not the cheesy Valentine's you passed around in class. It's not the rhyming couplets on a Hallmark card.

Poetry is an intellectual exercise. A poet didn't write a poem just 'cuz they felt like it. They wrote a poem because they wanted to say something in a certain way.

Seriously, if you want to say 'I love you', then say 'I love you'.

Or you can say 'I love you' in an octave and a sestet with an ABBA-ABBA-CDE-CDE rhyming scheme and five (poetic) feet of iambic pentameter.

'Course, you've gotta wonder with some of the stuff I had to study for school this year.

Make you wonder, ya know, what really is poetry?

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