Exquisite Corpse Literacy Narrative Essay

No other feeling supersedes the one I get when a tutor gives me an assignment or task that requires creative writing. That justifies the entire existence of literature because I get to communicate my thoughts to another person. However, that is only the case if that creative writing is not a poem. Unfortunately, on one occasion while I was in high school, a teacher handed us a term paper assignment that required me to formulate a poem. Furthermore, it wasn't just any poem; it was an exquisite corpse poem. These types of poems have no rules or restrictions that confine the author to any aspects of poetry. That particular experience turned out to be a learning opportunity as it increased my understanding of language and showed me how to apply for teamwork in learning.

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Exquisite corpse is a type of poem that involves several people who construct words independently and combine them to formulate a sentence. Participants in independent corpse poem have to be kept in the dark about what the words that the other participants have expressed until after team leader has combined the words to form sentences. Other parts of a phrase such as articles and prepositions can be added later after the words have been connected to make the sentences grammatically correct. Exquisite corpse poem does not necessarily have to make sense but what they do is improve the participants understanding and use of the English language. In some instances, the words combine to form surprising sentences that have deeper meanings than the authors originally intended.

The poem allowed me to apply some words that I have learned over the years. Since every person gets to contribute one word to the poem, I used the opportunity to use some new vocabularies that I have learned over the years. I was even surprised at how easy the task turned out to be. I have dreaded poems, all kinds of poems but as far as that experience was concerned, exquisite poems had turned out to be my favorite kind of creative writing. Furthermore, it was a deviation from the regular type of learning because it also enhanced my understanding of sentence structure. The basic requirement for exquisite corpse poem is that the group members agree on the structure that the sentences will follow. For example, in this case, the sentence construction was, 'adjective, noun, verb, adjective, noun.' Therefore, as a participant, I could not just throw in words. The experience built my understanding of the various parts of speech such as nouns and verbs.

I learned how to work in a group and enhance my learning experience through group work. The construction of an exquisite corpse poem requires more than one person. In this case, there were five of us. Each had the mandate to come up with any word that falls within the category of the part of speech assigned to them. At the beginning of the exercise, I was a bit nervous and weary whether I will be able to fit in the group. I usually worked alone. I never considered group work necessary because it worked to slow down my learning process. I am very opinionated, and I was afraid my opinions would upset the rest of the group members. However, one thing I was sure of the fact that not everyone will disagree with me. There are some who will see things from my point of view and side with me. As the group work started, a tall, lean, male asked me if I could suggest a sentence structure for them. I felt intense pain on my chest, and before I even realized it, my heart was racing. Everyone's eyes were on me. I felt targeted because I had not indicated that I wanted to contribute. Then another thought hit me. He might have been thinking that I was the best person to a suggest because of my history with creative writing. I walked past the parquet flooring, went to the whiteboard and wrote the proposed sentence structure. The rest of the team looked at it and liked it for its simplicity. Then the group leader said that for the next one hour we are going to spend it knowing each other. That ruffled my feathers because I didn't see the essence of knowing each other's persona or information. Then after an hour of mandatory socialization, to which I highly objected, we started formulating the corpse poem. To my surprise, most of the words fit together perfectly to create some unique meaning. At the end of the session, he explained that we were able to come up with such a poem only because of our information about each other's persona. Such information allowed us to try and anticipate what the other group members might say. I learned that the key to group work is trying to know about the other members and how they think.

Conclusion

I always found a task that required me to write poems to be a challenging task. However, the assignment to compose and exquisite poem turned out different because it improved my language understanding and taught me how to work in a group setting. Thanks to the experience I now understand the parts of a speech and how they come together to increase the clarity of the sentence. I also excel in a group work setting because I know the importance of knowing your group members' personality before discussion so that I can understand how to associate with them.