Post 9 Onion

Readers can make three false assumptions when reading poems. “The first is assuming that they should understand what they encounter on the first reading, and if they don’t, that something is wrong.” My first attempt at reading “The Traveling Onion” by Naomi Shihab Nye I felt as if I needed to seek out the meaning behind the Onion. What exactly was the meaning Nye was trying to get across to me as a reader? And that is when I made the first mistake as a reader: I felt as if my first read through the poem should have been something where I could immedialty picked up the meaning. However, after writing down my first ideas about eh poem, it made me want to read more and try to decode the poem.

The next false assumption when reading poems “is assuming that the poem is a kind of code, the each detail corresponds to one, and only one, thing, and unless they can crack this code, they’ve missed the point.” I feel like I do not make this mistake. Or that I want to convince myself that I do not make this mistake. Because I believe if I narrow down my opinion on a poem then I being stubborn. But maybe I was being a bit stubborn when assuming that I could “decode” the poem when I was so eager to pick it up and read it again.


“The third is assuming that the poem can mean anything readers want it to me.” After evaluating different views on what Naomi was describing in her poem, and listening to other people’s opinions on the poem, I would see how people could easily fall under this assumption. I feel like poetry is unconvential writing that can be appreciated when explored in convential terms such as our “literary experiment” in class.