Poetry Study Goals

After reading through Chapter 3 of Peterson's AP English about poetry multiple choice sections of tests, I now have 5 study goals to make for myself. Hopefully I can stick with them so I can do better on tests and that they will make answering questions about poetry simpler.

1) Understand who is speaking in the poem and when

2) Strengthen vocabulary understanding (learn more terms for poetry...)

3) Being better able to locate as well as understand the theme(s) of the poem

4) Read through the poem multiple times

5) Figure out the style of poem

          The first one I chose was due to one of the tips that was given- I usually assume that the speaker is the author, which they tell that most of the time is not the truth. They say to look for the prepositions that are used to help indicate who the speaker is and if they are in the story or watching it as well as male vs. female. Strengthening my vocabulary will make reading and understanding poetry generally easier as well as make me feel more confident when I can actually understand what the speaker is saying and describing. It's not fun when I read the words given and know what one of them mean and that it definitely doesn't describe the tone of the poem. Also I'm a terrible guesser... "What is the main theme of this poem?" One of the questions I often dread, because I feel that though there are right and wrong answers in literature, there are also opinion based questions that could be a multitude of things and sometimes the one I think is correct isn't offered. While I know that the theme of Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat isn't about death and suffering, people see things in different ways. Hopefully during the year I can answer questions about theme better than I can now. Reading through the poem multiple times helps give a better understanding to the reader than when you read it once- when rereading books I find more details the second time through that are key than I did the first because I didn't know what to look for. Reading through once doesn't give the thoroughness that is needed; even if it does save time at the moment, you'll spend more time looking through the poem for answers than you would if you had read it correctly. ...Gotta work on that... Lastly, although there are definitely more things I could work on, one that I want to focus on is identifying the style of the poem. Style can tell a lot about the poem and help with identifying other important things as well- tone, speaker, themes. Generally the theme of an ode isn't war and violence, so figuring out the style of poem can help lead me in the right direction.