Week 2

We take students in a different direction during the second week, as we focus on the intersection of music and poetry. Poetry is a different form of expression and has a different set of conventions than narrative. We will look at how rhythm and rhyme create a secondary level of meaning beyond the explicit meaning of the wording in a work. This will be driven home when we focus on rap, as it is so similar to poetry. However, blues music also relies heavily on rhythm and rhyme, and we hope to introduce students to these concepts through a day of blues poetry. Lastly, we will focus more closely on wording and imagery during a day on folk music. Folk music most closely mimics the wordplay aspect of poetry, and we will use both Bob Dylan’s music and his poems to discover these similarities.

---