Reading For Writers Poetry: Docupoetry is a generative seminar exploring the possibilities (and impossibilities...) of using poetry to document a moment in history at both micro and macro levels. How can documentation as an active process help us understand our moment, our political and historical selves, the personal psychologies that drive us as writers? Is "documentation" an act of preservation, or is it creation, or destruction? Students will position themselves as archivists, historians, story tellers, journalists, poets, photographers who use language, witnesses, and many other indescribable roles as we encounter some truly formally and linguistically wild and weird poetry works. What are the burdens put on fact-based or "truth-telling" poetry? How does docupoetry as a genre challenge our idea of reader-writer relationship, and poetry's polite role in the world? What is the efficacy of using text or materials drawn from sources external to the poet in order to document ephemeral or unspeakable experiences? Every week students will read works of docupoetry, discuss them, and write their own works, with a component of in-class generative writing and experimentation. Students should be prepared to consider non-poetry texts, as well as published works that incorporate hybrid forms and vocabularies, ranging from transcripts, found-language text, historical imagery and documents, photography, and many others. Each week we will produce brand new material for our poetry and docupoetry projects that we wish to pursue, investigating and learning about a topic that can't be conveyed in "traditional" poems. This seminar requires active participation in both halves: the seminar portion and the generative poetry aspect. Activities, exercises, and prompts will help students design and complete a final project suited to their interests as emerging docu-poets. We will read poets including but not limited to Layli Long Soldier, Nicole Sealey, Jena Osman, Muriel Rukeyser, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Philip Metres, CD Wright, Carolyn Forche, and many others.

RFW POETRY: POETS AGAINST GENRE! The most radical and exciting poets have always played with genre conventions, helping themselves to techniques cross fiction, essay, journalism, documentary, memoir, lyric, visual art, movement, collage, and other completely indescribable "types" of creative making. In this poetry seminar we'll read work that subverts, remixes, and disrespects genre, collecting methods for making our own writing as genre-defiant as we want. How do these poets forge a hybrid language that can describe the indescribable times they live in? What happens when the vision and emotion of a poet refuses to be boxed in by the politeness of a single genre?