This course provides an introduction to the central concepts, craft issues, and techniques of poetry writing, and to the conventions of the creative writing workshop overall. Besides providing the opportunity for students to write in poetry, this course exposes students to a critical vocabulary of the genre, stylistic techniques and forms prevalent within it, as well as extensive and diverse readings within, and at the boundaries of, the genre. Students engage in textual analysis, and will learn to locate readings in a larger literary and literary-historical context. Students will write and workshop a significant amount of new creative work in poetry and develop a sense of process and revision within the genre. No prerequisites.

This course provides an introduction to the central concepts, craft issues, and techniques of poetry writing, and to the conventions of the creative writing workshop overall. Besides providing the opportunity for students to write in poetry, this course exposes students to a critical vocabulary of the genre, stylistic techniques and forms prevalent within it, as well as extensive and diverse readings within, and at the boundaries of, the genre. Students engage in textual analysis, and will learn to locate readings in a larger literary and literary-historical context. Students will write and workshop a significant amount of new creative work in poetry and develop a sense of process and revision within the genre. No prerequisites.

Introduction to Poetry: The Malleability of Form. This workshop will explore the development and the malleability of form by putting classical forms in conversation with the ways contemporary poets have subverted these forms (for example Shakespeare’s sonnets alongside poets like Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Wanda Coleman and Gwendolyn Brooks). We will also read poets like Evie Shockley, Christian Bök, and Harryette Mullen who have used constraints to create tforms. Forms can be both a constraint and a liberation. In this workshop we will explore some of these issues, discuss, read and listen to students’ poems, and engage in the process of revision. This workshop will focus on student’s writing, and seeing how certain forms might speak to them and their current perspectives.

INTRO POETRY: This course will examine the ways in which poets engage, describe, and represent the multi-faceted self. Students will read and study both canonical and contemporary works in order to see how poetry engages the external world in order to better understand the inner one. We will study poetic techniques for allowing our written selves to be as complex, flexible, and three-dimensional as we are. Weekly poetry assignments and prompts will compliment close-reading and craft discussions, with a workshop component. May not be enrolled as the following classifications: Fifth Year or Senior. No pre-requisites.