HWK for MONDAY: Play with your new Poetry Blog

Today, we are setting up your Poetry Blog

(and your EA Google Gmail accounts - if you haven't already),

so that you can do the following:

1. Curate your own blog where you will...

2. Create a poetry portfolio: then, your best work you will...

3. Share to a Showcase blog, and...

4. Comment on one another's work.

Here are the steps for class:  

I. Create your Blogger Profile

         A. Select your TITLE  - Janie's Poetry Page  (you can change this later)

         B. Select your DOMAIN name - you cannot change this - 

                    Ex. poetrybyjanie.blospot.com or janies99.blogspot.com 

        C. Select "Simple" Design (you can change this later, too)

        D. Click "New Post"

II. Post your TWO sonnets to the blog.

        A. Include the hyperlinks to the sources. 

                   1. Highlight the title

                   2. Clink "Link" - Copy and Paste the poems URL - link.

                    3. Be sure you check the box "Open this link to a new window"

                    4. Repeat steps 1-3 above for the respective Poets of your sonnets

           B. Embed an interesting YouTube Video of one of the sonnets. 

                     

Option 1 - you can copy and paste the HTML from YouTube (this is what I prefer)

Screenshot

Option 2 - you can search via blogger by clicking the icon to "Insert a video";
then, preview and "Select".

III. Email me your blog's domain name. 

Or BETTER yet follow me - see "FOLLOWERS" below: 

Or "Add" to your "Reading list"to follow kobrienenglish9.blogspot.com:

IV. Feel free to play with your "Design" colors and "Layout" to personalize your blog.

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Just for fun...