Michael Clay Thompson: Poetics Program - Series by Royal Fireworks Press

This introduction to poetry emphasizes that poetry demands a whole-brain appreciation.

Among featured topics in this volume are:

Sound in language

Rhyme, end rhyme, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, eye rhyme.

Alliteration

Meter: the foot, iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl.

Stanza: sonnet, quatrain, couplet, ballad.

Poetic techniques: simile and metaphor.

Poets quoted include: Emily Dickinson, Robert Burns; William Shakespeare; Thomas Hardy, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Sample pages (pdf files): page 31 | page 83 | page 145 | page 146|

The second book of Michael Clay Thompson's stunning new Poetry series uses architecture as an extended metaphor, showing that poems are constructed like buildings and with careful attention to every detail.

Topics: alliteration, assonance, consonance, end rhyme, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, eye-rhyme, foot, iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, sonnet, ballad, rime royal, limerick, simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe, endstopped/enjambed. Can be used as a stand-alone introduction to poetry for young students, or to set the stage for a more advanced program in middle or high school.

Enables students to understand and appreciate poetry on a far higher level than usual. Stunningly presented.

Poets quoted in this volume include: Lewis Carroll, TS Eliot, Gelett Burgess, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robet Louis Stevenson, John Keats, Edward Lear, Walt Whitman, Lord Byron, Robert Frost, Henry Longfellow, Percy Shelley,William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Samples: (pdf files) Page 5 | Page 29 | Page 39 | Page 51

Teacher manuals for the curriculum always contain the student book, plus extra pages for instruction, answers to questions where applicable and suggestions throughout the text for teachers to implement.

 Sample page (pdf file) page 28  | page 129 | page 141   

This volume is built on comparisons of poetic and scientific observations of nature and the world around us.

Among featured topics are:

Sound: alliteration, assonance, consonance, end-stopped enjambed.

Rhyme: end rhyme, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, eye-rhyme, near rhyme.

Meter: the foot, iamb, trochee, dactyl, spondee, amphibrach, amphimacer, pyrrhic.

Stanza: Shakespearan sonnet, Petrarchan sonnet, ballad, rime royal, limerick, haiku.

Figures of speech: simile, metaphor, personification, apostrophe.

The grammar of poetry

Poetic genius, originality

Poets quoted include: T S Eliot, Walt Whitman, Christina Rosetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A E Houseman, Percy Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, Anne Sexton, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allen Poe, W B Yeats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Emma Lazarus, Sylvia Plath, Basho Matsuo.

Sample pages (pdf files): page 6 | page 56| page 137

sample pages (pdf files): page 8 | page 9 | page 26 | page 163

This volume develops and expands the program even further and is built on a theme of understanding humanity and our existence. It shows how poets push language to its maximum in order to express those things about humanity that are most true, or difficult or subtle. Longer and more challenging poems are used as examples.

Topics included in the previous volumes are also here, but in more detail, also in addition:

Advanced Rhymes: half-double rhyme, elided rhyme, amphisbaenic rhyme, reverse rhyme, half-rhyme.

Advanced meter from monometer to octameter.

Stanza: heroic couplet, terza rima, villanelle, quintet, sestet, octet, submerged sonnet.

Figures of speech: metonymy, synecdoche, oxymoron.

Poets quoted include:Thomas Hardy, William Blake, William Shakespeare, Henry Longfellow, Algernon Swinburne, W B Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, William Cowper, WS Gilbert, Thomas Wyatt, William Wordsworth, G J Chesterton.

Sample pages (pdf files): Table of Contents | page 5 |  page 47

 sample page (pdf file)

Using Plato's Dialogues and Socratic questioning as a source of ideas and a way of thinking about the complex problem of beauty, this, the fifth volume in the acclaimed new Poetics Program by Michael Clay Thompson, continues the study of poetry techniques and poems. It is a wonderfully illustrated, thought-provoking and challenging addition to the series and, like the other volumes, can also stand alone.

Is beauty relative? Is beauty a mystery? Poetry helps us look at these questions.

The table of contents includes: The Beauty of the Voice; Beautiful Patterns of Sound; Meter and Beauty; The Beauty of Stanza.

The student is asked to explore further such concepts as The Complex World of Technique and the Socratic paradox: "I only know that I know nothing".

There are numerous quotations from Plato and Aristotle.

Poets quoted include: Thomas Gray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning; William Blake; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Geoffrey Chaucer; Edmund Spenser; Alexander Pope; John Milton; ee cummings; Sylvia Plath; Ralph Hodgson; Herman Melville; John Keats; WB Yeats; Ben Jonson; Robinson Jeffers; Christina Rosetti; William Wordsworth.

Sample pages (pdf files): page 5 | page 35 | page 111

Sample pages (pdf files): page 94 | page 95

This, the sixth and latest volume in the Poetics Program by Michael Clay Thompson, continues the study of poetry techniques and poems and takes it to a higher level. It can be used as a stand-alone or as a continuation of the series.

Using Plato's Dialogues and Socratic questioning as a source of ideas and a way of thinking about the concept of truth, we are led to consider the difficult question that has absorbed philosophers, scientists, artists and poets: what is the nature of truth?

Many poems deal with the concept of truth. Great poems that stand the test of time express, at their core, something that is true.

We look at the truth of Sound, Meter and Stanza and at Figures of Speech that explore Truth through Comparison.

Poets quoted include: Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, Percy Shelley, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dylan Thomas, William Blake, Sir Walter Scott, Edmund Spenser, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

sample pages (pdf files): page 64|   page 75 | page 125

In response to requests from parents we have produced this two-volume anthology of the poems that are covered, quoted from, and studied, in the Poetics Program. This elementary-level volume is a companion to Music of the Hemispheres, Building Poems and World of Poetry.

There are 85 wonderful poems, printed in their entirety, with an introduction by Michael Clay Thompson..

There is currently a special, pre-publication price for the second volume, the secondary-level, covering the upper levels of the program

This Level Two Companion Anthology complements the upper levels of the Poetics Program: Poetry and Humanity; Poetry, Plato and the Problem of Beauty; Poetry, Plato and the Problem of Truth and includes 150 poems printed in their entirety.

Michael Clay Thompson writes in his Introduction: This anthology is not a student text to read from front to back. The organizational plan of the book is not pedagogical. The pedagogy is in the textooks. This is an instructor’s reference book to be used as a companion with the textbooks. Some of the poems will make superb readings for students, and others will be better used for the instructor’s information and reserved for the students’ future. I have attempted not to make that decision for you, but to do, in the simplest way, what you asked: to provide complete poems.