Embedded Files
Session 1 Resources:
Session 1 Resources:
Johannesburg Mines
by Langston Hughes
In the Johannesburg mines
There are 240,000
Native Africans working.
What kind of poem
Would you
Make out of that?
240,000 natives
Working in the
Johannesburg mines.
Session 2 Resources:
Session 2 Resources:
To the left is an interview with Quique Aviles by the Library of Congress. In class we listened to his poem starting at 17:15.
BILLS-110hres194eh_African_Americans.pdf
BILLS-111sjres14is_Native_Americans.pdf
Session 3 Resources:
Session 3 Resources:
Session 4 Resources:
Session 4 Resources:
"The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks - at 1:00:40 in the player to the right.
Link to text - "The Mother"
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Laura Orem is the founder and director of the Women's Voices Mentorship Program for Writers. She is the author of the chapbook collection, Castrata: a Conversation and the full collection: Resurrection Biology (2017). She holds an MFA from Bennington College and lives in Pennsylvania.
In the audio clip, below, Orem does a beautiful job placing personal value on political poetry. The full interview can be found at "The Poet and the Poem" a service developed by the Library of Congress.
Laura Orem_Political_Poetry.mp3The more personal a political poem is, the more likely it will be effective.
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Poetry as Persuasion by Carl Dennis
Focusing on the relation of the poet to the reader, Carl Dennis proposes that poems are acts of persuasion and that the strength of a poem's speaker is the key to winning the reader's sympathetic attention. Dennis identifies the qualities of passion, discrimination, and inclusiveness as essential in creating a compelling speaker. This emphasis on character leads to fresh discussions of point of view, irony, myth, and genre. Each subject is developed through careful readings of a wide variety of poets―from Whitman and Dickinson to contemporaries. Lucidly written, Poetry as Persuasion offers both inspiration and important advice for practicing poets, and at the same time provides anyone with an interest in poetry a fresh understanding of its appeal.
Session 5 Resources:
Session 5 Resources:
Session 6 Resources:
Session 6 Resources:
To find the mailing address of a member of the House of Representatives, CLICK HERE.
To find the mailing address of a member of the Senate, CLICK HERE.
Poems for Politicians Letter SAMPLE.
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