Guest Blogger - Tania G.

When I was young, about six years old, I picked up my first poetry book and began to read. It was the most colorful, vivid, creative thing I had ever read. That book was The Cat in The Hat and I fell in love. The poems were so easy to understand with it’s small words and yet it painted such a big picture in your mind. Now at seventeen I find myself struggling with the poems in AP Lit. The poems which were once so simple had become very confusing. I asked myself whether it was really necessary to use all the confusing metaphors and similes to get the point across. Why couldn’t the poems simply state what they were trying to say? Then it hit me. It was sort of like my childhood poems were simple color crayon pictures in my mind. I could draw it quickly and in the end the drawing was obvious but plain, which was enough to entertain me back then. But the poems I read now are much different. These poems use many different mediums and use different techniques every time. Picture Starry Night by Van Gogh with it’s movement or Sunday Afternoon by Georges Seurat with it’s pointillism. These drawings take much longer to create but in the end the pictures they paint are more intricate, and descriptive. There is so much more to notice and you really see things in a different perspective. The thing is you have to know a little bit about art to really appreciate it and the same goes for poems. If you don’t have the skills or knowledge to spot the hidden meaning all your seeing is the pretty colors and shapes. Once you start to acquire these skills you start noticing things you didn’t see before and slowly you begin to notice the complementary colors and delicate strokes. So maybe things aren’t as easy as “one fish, two fish” anymore. I’m moving on to bigger more colorful pictures, slowly but surely.