ENE 5007 Poetry for Young Adults
This course focuses on reading, analyzing, selecting, evaluating, and encouraging the informed enjoyment of poetry by young adults. In this course you will look closely at poetic structures and language, engage in close readings of poems by a variety of poets, and expand upon their understanding of the relationship of poetry, illustration, music, and other art forms. Course will cover classic poets such as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Carl Sandburg, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and others. Other topics to be studied will include the poetry of under-represented people, and the room for inventiveness and self-expression within a single verse form (such as the haiku). Assignments will consist of compiling a short anthology of poems for a specific grade, and connecting the anthology of poems to music, art, film, drama and other forms of expression including speech and other media. The anthology will be accompanied by original illustration or illustrations (can be computer art, pen and ink, crayon, or other media) for a selected poem. Students will also write several short reaction papers to professional journal articles, participate in in-class and web-based discussion.