Teen Book Club

The library is a great place for teens, and providing an online component can help foster their bond with the library and develop healthy social relationships. This page has examples with respect to club activities, and the sidebar holds features that would appeal to the teen demographic.

The Shout Box can be configured to only be shown to registered users, it can allow different levels of users to moderate it, and it can also automatically ban specific words. By allowing only registered users, a library can be sure that users will not abuse the Shout Box.

Twitter is a popular online service that many young adults use, and the library can also use this tool to engage young adult readers. Here we have embedded a Twitter functionality that keeps the page dynamic.

The Teen Book Club is planning a Saturday lunch at the Whitehorse Tavern in New York City. This pub in Manhattan’s West Village was a favorite watering hole for the poet Dylan Thomas whose poems we have been reading this month. Anyone interested should contact the_______________. It is expected that $20 should be sufficient for a burger and soft drink, and a short tour of the neighborhood will commence after lunch

Get ready for our next meeting where we will be discussing the poems of Dylan Thomas.

Thomas’s poetry is famous for its musicality, most notable in poems such as Fern Hill, In the White Giant’s Thigh, In Country Sleep and Ballad of the Long-legged Bait. Do not go gentle into that good night, possibly his most popular poem, is unrepresentative of his usual poetic style.

Thomas’s verbal style played against strict verse forms, such as the villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night. His images were carefully ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations. Thomas saw biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and in his poetry he sought a poetic ritual to celebrate this unity. He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life again. Therefore, each image engenders its opposite. Thomas derived his closely woven, sometimes self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore and preaching, and Freud.

In reply to a letter in which the writer expressed their love for his poetry but was concerned that they may have misunderstood what the poet meant, Thomas replied that a poem was like a city having many entrances: poetry was the apex of culture, the spire of civilisations, the scalpel of emotion and the anvil of thought, whispering and bellowing the unsayable with mere words…