Youth Poetry Week - April 6 to 12th 2009
Young Poets' Week 2009 - April 6th to 12th 2009
This April, the League of Canadian Poets helped teachers increase creativity in their classrooms by exploring the theme for National Poetry Month 2009, PLANET POETRY during celebrations of Young Poets' Week (April 6-12).
We offered new poetry exercises that asked the following questions: 1. Where do you consider home? What does it mean to be Canadian? Do you feel like people misjudge you? How does that make you feel? What role does poetry play in your identity? What is pantoum, a Sestina, a Quatrain? The League encouraged teachers to explore these ideas by infusing their classroom activities with environmental and diversity themes for April 2009. Here are the exercises we provided:
Monday, April 6th: Teaching Form Poetry
Although modern poetry tends to favour what we call “free verse,” lately there seems to be a revival of “form poetry,” or poems that make use of traditional structures, such as the sonnet, pantoum, glossa and ghazal. For many, writing in form is a way to create a framework in which to work. For others it feels like a constraint. W.H. Auden went as far as to say that “The poet who works in free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry, and darning himself.” Pour en savoir plus »
