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.

INTRO POETRY: POETIC METHODOLOGIES. This course shall explore the pre-modern, modern, and postmodern manifestations in poetry. We shall concentrate on the evolution of a poem--from ideas to writing, rewriting, revision, publication. Through making discoveries as we write different kinds of poems (conventional and experimental), our attention will fasten on forms, themes, registers of language, styles, structures, visions, aesthetic consciousness, types of poetry, polyvalence, minimalism, intentionality, maximalism, global poetic open-endedness, personal and public poetic quests, dream-infused works, poems of documentary axis, surrealist texts and arts, filmic/video adventures, abstract and realist writings, a plethora of creative possibilities. Commentary, analysis, and critique shall be utilized in our exploration of poetry. In addition we will use a notebook/journal to respond to the weekly writing prompts, poems, and essays/interviews we shall be reading both inside the classroom and at home. Our poems will be workshopped. A final portfolio of revised and finished work is required to cap the course. Poetry is generative. It is genre-fluid. Poets push the boundaries of what is acceptable. In our reading and writing we shall aim to foreground stylistic eclecticism and open-minded thematization.

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. No pre-requisites.