Usually, I enjoy poetry that I understand and that presents some point of importance. Unfortunately, the poetry that we had to read for Monday’s class on the Brooklyn Bridge was filled with details and overly worded sentences, inhibiting my ability to understand it. I’m not as experienced with poems as I am with other forms of literature, so I have not learned the ways to understand poems well. However, the exercises we did in class have helped me to better my comprehension techniques of poems that I initially found to be boring and over complicated. The technique of breaking a poem apart line by line is very helpful because it allows the reader to focus on the message of every single line rather than the bigger picture. Through this technique, the individual messages of every line in the poem come together to paint the overall message that the poet is trying to send in the couplet. Another technique we learned is to take a line of the poem and diverge onto a different poem or story, allowing us to better comprehend the message of that line. These techniques have helped me to understand the poems better, increasing my liking for them.
Today’s rap is a form of poetry that many people enjoy and describe it as music rather than poetry. But like poems, rap has to be understood for the listener to fully comprehend and enjoy it. Maybe that’s why I never really enjoyed rap for the most part. The lyrics are filled with words that most people don’t understand and the speed with which the rapper speaks them is too quick to comprehend. However, employing the same techniques that we learned in Monday’s class for poems, I can use on the lyrics of rap songs to get a better idea of the meaning of the song. Maybe after I learn how to better understand rap songs, I’ll generally enjoy the whole genre more.
