Reading for Writers Poetry examines how poets engage with poetic texts and reflect upon their own engagements with language and genre. Students will read poetry, poetic essays, and cross genre works by poets. The readings for this course will highlight contemporary and recent poetic interventions that are edgy, avant-garde, and challenging. In addition to reading and learning about contemporary ideas and movements in poetics, students will have an opportunity to reflect upon their own writing practice. Class readings, discussions, and writing assignments will provide a space for an exploration of poetic and philosophical questions. Among other poets and poet-critics, this course may include essays and poetry by Lisa Robertson, Charles Bernstein, M. NourbeSe Philip, Denise Riley, Peter Gizzi, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee.

Reading For Writers Poetry: Documentary Poetics will explore the generative and intertextual possibilities of using poetry to document a moment in history, at both the micro and macro levels. How can documentation as an active process help us understand political moments, our political and historical selves, the personal psychologies and pathologies that drive us as writers? Students will locate themselves as readers and writers in the collision between first-person experience and socio-historical reality, working to better understand the efficacy of documentary process as both a mode for poetic inquiry and a methodology for the poet’s construction of new creative work. 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. Via a hearty reading list of poetry and experimental texts, we will consider how craft-driven and contextually aware reading practices may help us better achieve the effects we wish to see in our own writing. Weekly creative activities, exercises, and poetry prompts will compliment ongoing literary analysis responses culminating in a final paper of students’ own design. Works by Layli Long Soldier, Alice Oswald, Maggie Nelson, Mark Nowak, Claudia Rankine, Philip Metres, and Don Mee Choi, among others, will be considered.