I will admit that I struggled finding a poem to do exercise number 8 with. Having never done anything like this exercise before, I wasn’t sure exactly which direction to take it in. I chose Norwood’s poem, ‘Anyway I Ran at the Tree Again’ and, at first, I tried to reverse the meaning of every word, but ended up with a garbled mess. Returning to the poem, I tried to reverse the meanings of individual lines, but still ended up with something that sounded incomplete. Eventually, I figured out what the heck I was trying to do and I submitted it, but it made me take a different approach to reading the poem than I had before. I read the poem as having a different meaning than the first few times I read it. Also, I began to think about what the poem was implying with its unsaid “Negative Image”. Did anyone else change their perspective on a poem because of this exercise?
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That’s such a good point: I used the poem “Two Moths,” and definitely think it changed my opinion on the poem! To properly get the negative of each statement I had to evaluate what each line was saying. My poem did end up going in a different direction (turning into something about unfaithful housewives in the suburbs) but I did end up rereading the poem a few more times with a new understanding. Since then, I’ve thought about doing the same thing with some of my favorite poems, not for the sake of writing a negative but just for the sake of better understanding the original material.