Exploring Literature Week 1

Welcome to all our Clemente students at Mission Australia in Surry Hills. We had a wonderful first class looking at poetry by Margaret Atwood (“You Fit Into Me”), Richard Tipping (“Mangoes”) and  Judith Wright (“The Wattle Tree”). It was wonderful to see how quickly this group found ways of discussing both the beauty of the poetry and the many ideas that are contained in poetic language. Thank you all for your keen and willing participation. This promises to be a great 12 weeks ahead of us. By the way I usually create links for you on the things I mention in my blogs, so if you are interested you can go back and click on the authors’ names above and it will take you to some further interesting information about them. This kind of linking (by the way) is called “hypertext”, that is text that is alive and that links you to all sorts of further information.

Next week we will be exploring more of the poems in our anthology and we will also be doing a very short in-class writing exercise. This is in order that both I and your learning partners can get a clearer idea of how we can help you master this unit (and others in the Liberal Arts Diploma).

A really good resource that you all should have a look at it is the following document on Poetic Devices. Have a good read of this:

Poetic Devices

What I have also included here is a recording of the seminar that we had last Wednesday afternoon. This will give you a chance to listen again to any part of our conversation, but it will also give your learning partners an opportunity to hear what fun we were having working on this poetry. Here is the recording for the seminar:

Here too are the images that were used accompanying our talk (click on the link):

Lecture Week 1

And here are the white-board notes that accompanied the discussion.

Here too is the recording that was made afterwards in our discussion with the learning partners. I have posted this up so that those learning partners unable to make it this week, will have a chance to listen-in on the key issues from this week’s discussion:

BLOG TOPICS:

Here are a few blog topics that you might like to try to get you started in the world of literary blogging- try to restrict your blogs to no more than 200 words. 

1/ Describe in as much detail as possible the place you live and the view from your window.

2/ Chose any one of the poems that we looked at this week and say why you liked it.

3/ Now that you have experienced three very different kinds of poem, try to write a poem of your own that captures something significant about your own experience or that expresses an idea that is really important for you.

If you want to do question 3 as a prose paragraph rather than a poem- that is, of course, perfectly fine!

BE SURE TO POST YOUR BLOG URL INTO THE SPACE PROVIDED IN LEO- THIS WILL ALLOW ME TO ACCESS YOUR BLOG AND GIVE YOU COMMENTS.