Hello fellow classmates!
It’s been such two great semesters with you all, and I cannot believe that our first year of university is already coming to an end. During this time I had the opportunity to explore in depth traumatic events, how they are perceived, and how people react to and remember them. I found that the most effective way to represent and make a traumatic event “everlasting” is through the use of poems. As we discussed during our lectures, they have the ability to be open to multiple interpretations, unlike novels. Although the latter is another effective way to commemorate such events, it is harder for the reader to put itself into the situation. This is because of how in depth the description has to be and because of the amount of details that are needed in order to write a story. On the other hand poetry, especially lyric poetry, became extremely popular after the 9/11 attacks, because of its ability of being considered “confessional poetry”. That is because of how personal it can be and, because of the messages that it carries, it is easy for the reader to recognize its own feelings in these poems. For instance the poem September 1, 1939 is about the period in between both World Wars. It describes the anger and the fear that the people of that period were feeling, however these feelings have always existed throughout history, therefore, even after the 9/11 people could still relate to that poem.
I have never thought of trauma as a topic, of which analysis could be so fascinating and interesting. Through its studies, it is now easier to understand how important it is to see and keep in mind multiple points of view. That is because building an opinion only based on one person’s argument, can be quite constraining. However this is quite hard to do where there is no a right or wrong interpretation, such as it is in poems. This, therefore, rises the questions of is there a point of view that is more correct than another? And since poems have the ability of including multiple points of view and interpretations in themselves, would they be considered more legitimate than novels or graphic novels?
