Response for Isabel

Isabel’s sonnet ConquistaDirector is about a filmmaker with the spirit of a conquistador.  It is basically about taking something someone else has, be it a script, book, actor’s voice, etc. and creating something out of it to make it her own.  This is a great title for this poem because she is able to make a connection between film directors and conquistadors, while conquistadors take over a land that already has a civilization, conquer it and make it their own, film directors, in essence, do the exact same thing but to a piece of literature or screenplay and making it their own.  Also, the title sounds really cool because if you take out the “irect” in the title, it spells “Conquistador” which makes it a cool play on words.  I didn’t realize this until after I read the poem so maybe if it were entitled something like “Conquistad(irect)or” it would be more obvious to the reader, but that’s just my suggestion.  The poem uses the Shakespearean sonnet as a model for the rhyme scheme, (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) but lacks the iambic pentameter. She used good solid words to make her rhymes stick out, i.e. “direct, erect”, “throat, gloat”, etc.  I also liked the way she used the last two lines in the poem as the “turn”.  The first three quatrains she is kind of preaching (or as she says gloating) about how she is a tour-de-force director, who can take the smallest things and turn them into grand spectacles, “Build myself monuments men never erect” (Line 3), but she takes a turn in the last two lines and begins to question herself, “If worlds tilt, at the wrap, will I live without credit?” (Line 14)  This works nicely because it is a complete 180 from the way she has been speaking the whole rest of the poem.  All in all, I thought this poem was well written and I loved the comparison of conquistadors and directors.  I also think this would be a good poem to edit for later on; if she could somehow put it in iambic pentameter, she would have a true Shakespearean sonnet.