Just the beginning

Blogging was a distant, strange idea for me before I actually started doing it. I did not realize how many words I had typed for the blog posts until I read through them. Writing these posts was great in terms of practicing writing and learning new knowledge. Skimming through the posts was almost a whole new learning experience. From the beginning of the Victorian arts post to the end of the Cold war post, these blogs followed the period of the poems that I learned. 

It was interesting to see the distinct characteristics of different period that were reflected by the poems, arts and even fashion of that period. Tennyson’s “The Bugle Song” was majestic and ornate, so were the arts during that time. The rich color shown in the arts was just as enchanting as the wording of Tennyson’s “The Bugle Song”. 

Few years later, Walt Whitman stood out with the concise and emotional America. What I could think of were the rebel artists of the period, the impressionists. Just like Walt Whitman, who abandoned the rhyming and used free verse to express his feelings, impressionists rejected the traditional way of creating their work. Instead of confining themselves in the cages, they took excursions beyond the studio to capture elegant images of nature and present them through their own interpretation. 

Just a split second, Sandburg rushed in to the classroom, praising Chicago and the America with a knife in his hands, head held high. He led me to the 1920s, a period filled with social ferment and the excitement brought by the new technologies. The growth of the film industry was as fast as that of the urbanization. Sir Charles Spencer “Charlie” Chaplin’s character appealed to the lower class, the working class of the time, the “Big shoulders” that Sandburg described. “Building, breaking, rebuilding” the cities helped create jobs so that people could enjoy their friday nights in the movie theaters. The film production reached 800 films per year and became the highest output in the history. 

Twenty years later, Jarrell led me to discover the World War II Flying Fortress and Superfortress by showing me the horrifying image of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”. Even though I did not wake to “Black Flak and the nightmare fighters”, I witnessed the Harlem renaissance and the Black arts movements through Brooks and Baraka. In the end, I learnt the the Cold War even had an impact on pushing the Civil rights movement. 

This was a magical term,

I walked in the classroom with nothing in my mind

I walked out with poems in my hands 

I stumbled upon the words 

I tried not to Rhyme........

There are moments

when the words flash before my eyes 

and I catch them

gently place them on the paper 

voilà !

there goes my poem.