lyric poetry 1 february 23
Defining poetry / What might we take away from these few weeks reading and thinking about poems?
We'll begin today by looking at a few of history's greatest definitions of poetry before trying to come up with one of our own.
Poems: Billy Collins, "Introduction to Poetry" and Eve Merriam, "How to Eat a Poem"
MAIN TOPICS: DEFINING POETRY / DIFFERENCES BETWEEN POETRY AND PROSE
LYRIC POETRY 2 FEBRUARY 24
Today we’ll continue defining poetry. I’ll then give a little advice for reading poetry, beginning with what we mean by a paraphrase, the first step in thinking about a new poem.
Poems about memories of fathers: “My Papa’s Waltz” and “Those Winter Sundays”
MAIN TOPICS: APPROACHING A NEW POEM / PARAPHRASING
ODYSSEY ESSAY REVISION FEBRUARY 28
LYRIC POETRY 3 March 2
One way poems are different from prose is that they have a unit of measurement prose does not: the LINE. Both prose and poetry have the WORD, the SENTENCE, and the STANZA/PARAGRAPH. But poetry also has the LINE, which is not always used to convey meaning but to call attention to something else, quite often RHYTHM, which can also convey emotion. Today we’ll look at Richard Wilbur’s “A Barred Owl” in conjunction with Billy Collins’s “The History Teacher” to compare the subject of protection of children and to think about rhythm and the unit of the line.
LYRIC POETRY 4 March 3 and march 7
Today we’ll introduce the sonnet form and look at the following two examples:
John Keats, “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Mezzo Cammin”
We’ll talk about form and rhyme; we’ll introduce meter. We’ll write a few sentences defining what the two poems have in common.
MAIN TOPIC: RHYME, FORM, STRUCTURE
lyric POETRY 5 MARCH 8
Today we’ll look at some common figures of speech and then turn to your text book to think about why poets use figures at all. Remember that figures of speech are meant to make poems more concrete not abstract as most students seem to think.
Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son”
Alice Walker, “Women”
MAIN TOPIC TODAY: FIGURES OF SPEECH
lyric POETRY 6 MARCH 20
Today we’ll practice a poem pair comparison, using Langston Hughes’s “Harlem” and John Updike’s “Ex-Basketball Player”.
I’ll also provide you with a redacted version of the poetry test.
lyric POETRY 8 MARCH 22
Tennyson’s “Ulysses”
lyric POETRY TEST MARCH 23
what's due?
February 21— Thesis and Topic Sentences for Odyssey Essay
February 28 — First Draft of Odyssey Essay
March 7 — Final Draft of Odyssey Essay
March 23 — Poetry Test
DOCS TO HAVE HANDY
TEXT TO buy now
STUDYING POETRY
Essays on poetic theory (Make Aristotle, Horace, Sidney, Keats, and Shelley a priority)
ENJOYING POETRY
Compilation by Maria Popova at BP
Brian Cranston reads Shelley's "Ozymandias"
enjoying literature
“In the realm of narrative psychology, a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally—picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning. This narrative becomes a form of identity, in which the things someone chooses to include in the story, and the way she tells it, can both reflect and shape who she is. A life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next.”
