Reading Response 1, Week 2

Reading Response Hugo’s five points

I like Hugo’s approach to poetry a lot more than other books I have read, or manuals on how to construct poetry. Poetry comes off to be this abstract form of expression, but I think that is the case because the reader is not in the poet’s head. When a poet writes something that grows out of an experience the writer does not start abstract, they must start small from an experience that is either made up or that actually happened. The best I think are the experiences that happen to you, because it adds to the visceral aspect of it all. The words are coming from your gut because the words are your gut, you’re spilling yourself on the paper not for the consumption of others, avoiding the “ I write for the world mentality” but to play with these words and make something out of a nominal nothing, or to write because you said hey I want to write about that. Which leads into the avoid room for explanation, a problem I find with myself. I want the person reading to be able to get what I am saying and it not be so damn cryptic, but that’s what adds to the “grandeur” of it all. A piece that no one will get unless they may have experienced something similar, or are breaking the poem apart. I get to suspend time, and I get to control what happens, the poet is in control not the audience, the way I read it Hugo is telling the audience to shut up and let them write you will understand the piece when she/he finishes.