Jacob L Lit and Performance Blog

IB Literature and Performance has been a great experience for me.  Coming into my junior year of high school I really did not know what to expect in this class.  I told myself that in life, you are always going to have to try new things even if you have no experience.  My two years in this class I have learned so much about writing, plays, acting, staging, novels, and actors.  When I read the course description I was most scared of the acting.  I never thought I could perform or act in front of classmates in friends because I wasn't that confident in myself.  By the end of this year I look back and see how much I grew with my performances and how I messed up multiple times but from that it has only made me stronger not only as an actor but also a person.  This class gave me that opportunity to be free and if I messed up everything would be okay because that is part of acting.  This class helped me with public speaking in front of groups.  For...

Color and sound provide some of the most vivid effects in poetry. How have at least two poems that you have studied used such visual and auditory aspects as these to enrich their poems? After reading two of Naomi Shihab Nye's poems I noticed that some of the poems talk about the visual details and auditory aspects when describing what is happening in the poem.  In the poem, "My Father and the Fig Tree,"  it talks a lot about the details and how the fig tree is so important to his father.  In the poem it said  " At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged. "That's not what I'm talking about! he said, "I'm talking about a fig straight from the earth – gift of Allah! -- on a branch so heavy it touches the ground."  This talks about the past making us think what this fig tree looked like.   "I'm talking about picking the largest, fattest, sweetest fig." It goes into detail how great this fig tree is.  The poem says how they...

Blood: - There are 5 Stanzas - Talks a lot about the Arabs -  Seems like the Arabs believe in healing because of the watermelons - "Arabs know how to catch a fly"- Seems like they are somewhat good at the things they do, like this -  There are some stereotypes - Mostly negative descriptions -  In the last stanza she questions her country asking herself -  Seems like she is confused and doesn't know what country she is really apart of My Father and The Fig Tree: - What are figs? - Talks about the culture and how all he wants to do is eat the fig - I figured that the fig is part of their culture - The father seems lazy - It ended happily with an abundance of fig trees in Texas - Shows the importance of fig trees to their culture

The language of a poem is often that one thing compared to another. In the work of at least two poets you have studied, explore how poets have made their subjects come alive through different means of comparing them. In the poem I memorized by Emily Dickinson, this would be a perfect question for it.  She talks about this nobody compared to a somebody.  "Im nobody! Who are you?"  "How dreary to be somebody."  She is clearly comparing the two which are the nobody and the somebody.  She's talks positively when she finds this other person who is also a  nobody.  She talks about how terrible it is to be somebody, "How public like a frog."  I liked the way she separated the two stanzas to compare the two points of view.  I like how she made it short and simple and you could clearly see why she would rather be a nobody than a somebody.  The detail in the second stanza really shows how terrible it is to be somebody. ...