Teacher: David Sloan
(Read more about his biography here)
Dates for 4-week course:
Offered again in the 2025-26 school year.
Times for Live Sessions: Monday through Thursday, Starting at 9:30am MT (which is 11:30am ET and 8:30am PT). Each live session lasts between 50 and 80 minutes.
Course Description
Why is it that people turn to poetry in times of greatest joy (weddings, births, tributes) and greatest sorrow (funerals, illnesses, catastrophes)? Poetry can be a distillation of people’s most secret longings, private losses, public celebrations.
In this course, students will learn to appreciate the sense of power and freedom that poetry can bestow, both upon poets and their readership. They will be introduced to the essential elements of poetry—the music, imagery, design elements—that will hopefully enable them to recognize the difference between irresistibly compelling and limp-rag ineffectual poetry. Students will have multiple opportunities to bring more conscious crafting to their own poetic efforts.
To that end, each night students will read several assigned poems—mostly from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—and come prepared to discuss them in class. Then they will write several of their own poems inspired by the readings. This course will also require that students share a final project toward the end of the block; they will prepare and recite for the class a poem they have committed to memory, at least 14 lines long. Then they will also share with the class some artistic response to the poem they’ve recited—either a poem of their own, a drawing, sculpture, dance, piece of music, etc.
