Brooke Voisard - Journal Four

Part One:
Overall, I thought Oliver's wrtiting was very helpful and informative. One of my biggest takeaways was from the beginning of the novel on imitation. Oliver stresses that it's okay, even recommended by her, to imitate another artist's work. She maintains that it is essential to developing your own voice and your own style. I found this really helpful because I was always very hesitant when referencing other works, but now as I do that more, I find that I am able to tweak another artist's style in a way that is entirely my own. It definitely helped to have an accomplished writer and teacher like Mary Oliver reinforce that it is okay to do that.
I also took a lot from the chapter about The Line. I had no idea what the line was before reading this chapter. I thought every line was a complete line in itself, but after reading this I learned that this isn't true. A line doesn't stop until there is some sort of punctuation, and I didn't know that was how you read a poem. I also became familiar with enjambment and how it is used and its effects on the lines of a poem. After reading this chapter, I am able to pick out how the line is used in other poems, and I am able to understand it better, and use it creatively and effectively in my own writing.
Part Two:
When reading the biography of Sharon Olds I was surprised that I had never heard of Sharon Olds before because she seemed right up my alley. I love the phrase "proud, urgent, human voice", and I hope that one day it's used to describe me. I was anxious to get to her poems to see if they would live up to all the excitement. I felt like it was wrong to say that she "spent too much time taking her own emotional temperature", because, without her emotional tempertature, the poems would not exist. We write about our feelings and things that move us. I would hate to see a world of emotionless poetry. It would be worthless. She wrote what she perceived and the reader can take it or leave it. I love reading about controversial topics, but so many people critique them so harshly, and reading so much about how Olds wrote so many controversial, and never before written topics made me even more excited to read her work.
The poem "I Go Back to May 1937" struck me the moment I read it. My parents split up when I was two years old, and they've had a horrible relationship since then, and my sisters and I suffered because of it. Olds describes many of the things I've felt over the years. I've also imagined my parents young and tried to imagine what they were thinking like Olds does. Yes, they've hurt me, and they've been selfish, but I'm alive because of them and so are my sisters. It's beautiful that we could come out of so much hate. Aside from the personal connections, I can imagine a young man and a young woman dressed for the time period, standing together in the warm sun outside a school. I can imagine it perfectly, and that's really valuable to me when reading a poem. I like to read and let my imagination go to work, and this poem allowed me to do this.