Course description
Good poets pay attention to words. Great poets attend to sounds. How do you create levity, melancholy, suspense—just by working with vowels, consonants, and syllable stress? In this poetry workshop, we survey an array of poetic forms, from the ancient hemstitch of Beowulf to the recent sonnet cycles of John Murillo. We study meter, caesurae, line breaks, and all those subtle, but intentional, moves that enhance a poem's affect and meaning. To immerse ourselves in the craft, we spend the first two or three weeks reading and discussing assigned poems, both historical and modern. For the remainder of the semester, we workshop one another's poems. Workshops are done anonymously. Names are removed from the poems submitted in order to maintain focus on the poem itself rather than the poet. This course encourages poets to share in, and build upon, the rich history of their craft. It is also open to creative writers who, working outside of poetry, want to enhance their prose at the level of sound. We are in it, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, for "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing."