Poetry Unit

Great work, everyone! Keep those haiku coming! You're doing a wonderful job including notable contrasts in your poems, and I'm appreciating the range of tones: somber, optimistic, humorous, frustrated, etc. Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) Goal #4: To pay attention - as the poet does - to the world around and within Please read about this familiar poetic form . Go outside with a notebook and pencil. Observe your surroundings, pay attention, and try your hand at a haiku. Think more about including a contrast than worrying strictly about the 5-7-5 syllabic pattern. Post your poem on the class discussion page.

Goal #2: To practice reading strategies that help us better appreciate a variety of poems For example: who is the speaker? where does the poem "shift" or "turn"? Please try out the strategy - Who is the speaker and what is the situation? - from the screencast on a poem of your choice. Post your comment on the class discussion page. For example: The speaker in “Digging” is a writer who communicates an admiration for his elders combined with a desire to pursue his own path. Although he does not want to do the same work as his relatives, he does hope to have the same work ethic. Through fond memories of his father and grandfather, he is able to see how writing is a form of digging.

Goal #1: To better understand and apply the language of poetry (i.e., the devices poets use and how or why they use them) For example: speaker/situation, simile, metaphor, enjambment, shift. SCREENCAST HERE Please read a poem of your choice and comment on one of the poetic devices in it. Use this list of poetic devices as a resource. Post your comment on the class discussion page. For example: I read Seamus Heaney's "Digging" and noticed a simile in the first stanza comparing a pen to a gun. It makes me think about how words can be used as weapons.

Read ONE of the sixteen sections of Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem . Report which section you read and share an idea from it on the discussion page. For example: I read the section "Give a Common Word the Spell." Hirsch talks about how poetry uses language in a way that isn't manipulative or abusive, but instead invites us to hear words as if for the first time - or at least in a new way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Optional: Try out your own version of this Robert Frost poem: Dust of Snow The way a crow  Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

Watch the screencast on Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.” Also, choose a poem from our class page (I’ve been posting poems of the day since the school closure). Read it aloud and respond to it on the discussion page (include the poet, poem title, and a question, observation, connection, inference, etc.). Example: I read "The Enkindled Spring" by D.H. Lawrence. I found the imagery in the first two lines to be a vivid description of what I'm noticing when I go outside these days. This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes When I squint at the tennis ball green buds on the maple trees these days, it does look like "bonfires green."

It's National Poetry Month! Why do we read (or NOT read) poems? Please respond on the discussion page: Also, watch the screencast on Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry.”