Overview
Poetry is a mysterious medium for students. They respond to it on an emotional level, and that response is usually something like "Yuck!" Even when students enter an honors or an AP English course, where the students are clearly driven or they would not have chosen to sign up for the class in the first place, those same driven students still approach poetry lessons with a sense of foreboding. Ekphrastic poetry, however, provides an entry point for students into a poem. When students read a poem that was written in response to a piece of art the effect is similar to illustrations in a children's book. Suddenly, they feel that basic comprehension of a poem is actually possible––yet simple comprehension is rarely what a teacher of poetry is seeking in her students. The wonderful thing about ekphrastic poetry is that it easily leads into a dialogue about the form and function of a poem and its components. This unit seeks to take students who dislike poetry and know little about it, and transform them into sophisticated and perceptive readers of poetry through an examination of various ekphrastic poems.
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