Creative Therapy Challenge #46

This challenge was What is your favorite poem, and why?

Can you believe, despite being in AP English from about 8th grade on, I didn't learn to love poetry until I was in college? Prior to that, the only poem I remember studying was T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland, which my junior year AP English teacher absolutely loved and made us interpret the hell out of, line by line. I adored my teacher, but she couldn't make me love poetry.

Ozymandias was the first poem I "got" all on my own. It was like a light went on in my head. I loved it so much I memorized it, the first (and so far only) poem I'd ever memorized. I loved the imagery, the build-up, and the final comment on mankind's hubris. Frankly, I loved the big words like visage and colossal, I loved phrases like antique land. I loved that it made me realize we need to live in the now, and not try to build monuments to ourselves that we foolishly believe will live forever:

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I learned to love poetry in teacher's college. I studied to be a secondary school English teacher, of all things, so I had to at least pretend to be interested in poetry. The book that did it for me was Sound and Sense. I still have a copy somewhere. It broke down poetry into layman's terms. Despite being so "advanced" all those years, I needed something simple to explain poetry to me, to make me love it. To turn the light on.

Not Dead Yet

An interesting article on blogging from Writer's Digest.

I can't imagine being so techologically hooked-up that it would kill you!

Well, as long as you're here, I may as well entertain you...

On Mondays we try to have a Family Night, which usually involves us all laying around watching a movie. A couple of months ago, E thought the kids would enjoy Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Yeah, I know, not smart. I remembered that it was a little racy, but forgot Christopher Lloyd's completely creepy end as Judge Doom (flattening a villian who then pops up and continues to come after you...the very stuff of children's nightmares. Thanks, E!)

Tess kept hiding under the covers, saying, "Turn it off! Turn it off!" but I wanted to assure her that Eddie Valiant & Co. get him in the end. She's at that age where you can draw the line between bad characters and the actors that portray them, so I mentioned that Lloyd plays a really great Good Guy in one of my all-time favorite movies, Back to the Future.

Santa was listening, and brought me the BTTF trilogy on DVD for Christmas. Not having learned our lesson, we spent a couple of Family Nights watching each in turn. The first movie isn't so horrible, some bad language and sexist situations (somewhat over Tess's head), then the second movie was too dark. At least Ben gave us all some perspective: he became obessessed with flying cars.

Both kids were bored by the third movie, wandering off during the romantic scenes (when Marty comes to get Jennifer off the porch, where they left her at the end of BTTF2, and leans in to kiss her, Ben actually turned away and said "ew" !!) (he is starting that way too early, LOL).

But we scarred Ben for life (again) when the modern freight train at the end completely destroys the DeLorean. He was taking in big gulps of air, near sobbing, saying, "Car! BOKEN!" At least we tried to assure him that Doc Brown would be able to put the car back together again. Sort of.

Holy cow, just looked up Lloyd's DOB. He is the same age as my mother. So is John Cleese. Maybe 70 is the new 50?

Resolutions

Hmmm, maybe mine should be to give up my blog...no...can't quite do that...but I am on facebook a LOT more often, so if you know me (or think you do), drop me a line and I can give you my moniker "IRL..."

At least I took the Christmas music off.