Poets. Org

"Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April, when publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools and poets around the country band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. Thousands of businesses and non-profit organizations participate through readings, festivals, book displays, workshops, and other events."

In celebration of poetry month, you will search for a poem/poet that you may find interesting. Make sure to stay on this page (poets. org) and that you not only post your poem, but speak about the poet as well as provide insight about the poem you chose. You will be sharing it with the class. Feel free to explore the site and the interesting things that they offer you.

http://www.poets.org/index.php

Poet Project

Poet Project Presentation

For this project, you will be choosing a poet to present and discuss with your classmates. The poet must be from the list that will be provided by your teacher in order to get credit for this project. You will be required to give a short biography presentation on your poet as well as recite one of their poems by memory. You will be expected to talk about the poem and explain why you chose to recite it. This will count as two test grades for this marking period.

1. Choose a poet and present a picture of the poet.
2. Must show full understanding of the poet’s life as a writer
3. Discuss some of their most famous poetry and what made them different.
4. How did society feel about their poetry?
5. Recite the poem
6. Discuss why you chose that poem and what you liked about it .
7. Explain what you understood from the poem and provide a connection.

1. e.e cummings _______________________________

2. Emily Dickinson ______________________________

3. Billy Collins _______________________________

4. Ezra Pound _______________________________

5. Lewis Carrol_______________________________

6. W. B. Yeats _______________________________

7. T.S. Elliot_______________________________

8. Pablo Neruda _______________________________

9. Dylan Thomas_______________________________

10. William Shakespeare__________________________

11. Robert Frost_______________________________

12. Maya Angelou _______________________________

13. Nikki Giovanni_______________________________

14. Gary Soto_______________________________

15. Walt Whitman _______________________________

16. Marge Piercy_______________________________

17. Charles Baudelaire_______________________________

18. Stanley Kunitz_______________________________

19. Gwendolyn Brooks_______________________________

20. Yusef Komunyakaa ________________________________

21. Joseph Rudyard Kipling ____________________________

22. Sylvia Plath ____________________________________

How does the video help you capture the mood of the poem? What do you notice by the way it is portrayed, think of the colors, the people etc.

Mid-term Break

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble,'
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

Seamus Heaney

After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains
by John Keats


After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains
   For a long dreary season, comes a day
   Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
   Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
   The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains.
The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves
   Budding—fruit ripening in stillness—Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves—
Sweet Sappho's cheek—a smiling infant's breath—
   The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs—
A woodland rivulet—a Poet's death.

Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump
by David Bottoms
Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride to the dump in carloads to turn our headlights across the wasted field, freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish. Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still like dead beer cans. Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow into garbage, hide in old truck tires, rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds, or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light toward the darkness at the edge of the dump. It's the light they believe kills. We drink and load again, let them crawl

Water Picture

Water Picture
by May Swenson
In the pond in the park all things are doubled: Long buildings hang and wriggle gently. Chimneys are bent legs bouncing on clouds below. A flag wags like a fishhook down there in the sky. The arched stone bridge is an eye, with underlid in the water. In its lens dip crinkled heads with hats that don't fall off. Dogs go by, barking on their backs. A baby, taken to feed the ducks, dangles upside-down, a pink balloon for a buoy. Treetops deploy a haze of cherry bloom for roots, where birds coast belly-up in the glass bowl of a hill; from its bottom a bunch of peanut-munching children is suspended by their sneakers, waveringly. A swan, with twin necks forming the figure 3, steers between two dimpled towers doubled. Fondly hissing, she kisses herself, and all the scene is troubled: water-windows splinter, tree-limbs tangle, the bridge folds like a fan.