Poetry Project

This week you will begin working on a poetry project.

"What's this poetry project all about?"

Good question, Declan McCarthy.  Here it is:

For this project, you will choose a poet, research their life and work, recite one of their poems in class, and analyze the poem you recite.

1. Choose a poet of literary merit, and create a blog post, which includes biographical background, as well as literary information about your poet and his or her works. You will research and give (via Prezi) a 5-7 minute presentation on your poet's life, influences, works, and legacy. Your prezi should be embedded into your blog post. Follow this link to help with embedding your prezi: https://prezi.zendesk.com/entries/22451538-Embedding-prezis

You should also post the full text of the poem you will recite below your embedded prezi. Embed audio of the poem if possible, if not, link to an audio site.

Your poetic analysis of the poem should be posted in the comments section of your post.

2. Perform, from memory, one of your poet's significant poems (this is the poem you included in your blog post). We will work out the schedule for your presentations later this week.

3. Once the poem is recited, you will give a poetic analysis of the poem you recited. You may also use a prezi or visual aids to help you in your analysis.

This project will be worth 100 points and will be graded according to your presentation (prezi), how you present (confidence, eye contact, knowledge, not reading off of the screen, voice projection, etc.  It will also be graded according to your performance of the poem (it should be memorized and performed with inflection and emphasis) as well as your poetic analysis.  We will work on poetic analysis before anyone presents.

Below is a list of potential poets you may be interested in; you may also choose someone not on this list, but you must get approval before you begin researching.  The poet must be someone of literary merit.

Seamus Heaney

TS Eliot

EE Cummings

WH Auden

Shakespeare

William Blake

William Carlos William

Pablo Neruda

Emily Dickinson

Walt Whitman

WB Yeats

Carl Sandburg

Rudyard Kipling

William Wordsworth

John Keats

Robert Browning

Robert Frost

Federico Garcia-Lorca

Ezra Pound

Langston Hughes

Maya Angelou

Dylan Thomas

Sylvia Plath

Allen Ginsberg

Robert Burns

Robert Hayden

Gwendolyn Brooks

Edgar Allan Poe

Oscar Wilde

Amy Lowell

Theodore Roethke

Wole Soyinka
Gary Snyder

I am excited to see you guys dive into poetry, and I am anxious to see your presentations and recitations of the poems you select! Have fun with this and explore some poetry- it may change the way you think!

Words of Wisdom from Walt.