This essay was very hard for me because it was something
different that I had not done before. I had trouble understanding the author
and the genre because I had to create empathy towards his words. I understood
the problem and its context, but expressing this through poetry was something
new to me that made me think and analyze the words in a different way. My
interpretation was very important because the poems were not specific sometimes
or didn’t show the whole idea immediately. The process of interpretation
required reading about the author and his live, the Harlem Renaissance, and
stories about those times. It was very interesting because to understand this
poem I had to read more in the outside rather than the poem itself. However,
after doing this it was easier to interpret and analyze the imagery. I found
some problems with my research because it is an oddly specific topic and we had
to use only the database from Valencia College which could make it a little bit
harder than just using Google. The research process had to involved keywords
such as the author name, Harlem Renaissance, or the title of the poem, but the
information was sometimes too broad to support one main idea in my essay. To
solve this problem, I had to read every paper that I was quoting to understand
the context and what the authors meant with their quotes in order to cite them
in my essay. I also had to provide a good context in my paper and a good analysis
to help the reader understand the importance of the quote that I used in my
paragraphs. This experience was very good because while it was challenging it
was also something new and different from what I used to do in previous essays
that didn’t involve poetry at all. Poetry was for me something that I never
tried, so I didn’t know if I would enjoy it or not, but at the end I think I
found the importance and meaning in this kind of writing.