Dear all:

As you may have heard, Stanford, Penn, Princeton and the University of Michigan are collaborating to offer free online courses to anyone, anywhere. The project has just gotten underway.

In this first round, Penn is offering four courses in the arts & sciences. A course I’ve been teaching here at the Writers House for many years – Modern & Contemporary American Poetry – is one these first experiments.

To find out more about the course, and to enroll, just go here:

https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry

No prior knowledge or understanding of poetry is necessary. It is a non-credit course, and again it is free. But it’s a significant and substantive version of the course I teach at Penn, and the poems and poets you encounter stand a chance of changing your life.

The course begins September 1 and runs for 10 weeks.

If you have questions, feel free to ask me.

Al Filreis
Kelly Professor, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House
Director, Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing
Director, PennSound
Publisher, Jacket2

http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis

Rules:

1. Kids must be 14 or younger.
2. Sonnets must be 14 lines of iambic pentameter.
3. No specific sonnet style is required.
4. One sonnet per child.
5. Sonnets must be received via email by June 1, 2012.
6. eep! (Ennis Electronic Publishing) will be the sole judges and will determine the winner by June 30, 2012.
7. All entries may be published by eep! on its website: www.kidseep.com
8. First prize winner will be awarded a $25 Amazon Gift Certificate, one ty Beanie Baby doll (Eggbert), and one copy of illustrated book, “Daisies and Raindrops. Sonnets for Children.”
9. Second prize winner will be awarded a $15 Amazon Gift Certificate and one copy of illustrated book, “Daisies and Raindrops. Sonnets for Children.”
10. Third prize winner will be awarded a $10 Amazon Gift Certificate and one copy of illustrated book, “Daisies and Raindrops. Sonnets for Children.”
Please send entries to: contest@kidseep.com with the Subject: Sonnet
11. You can find more information on how to write a sonnet here: http://www.sonnettics.com/here

But since they’re not, I guess they all must suck.

Feel free to write a sonnet with these lines.