Advanced practice in the original composition of poetry for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers perspective on the places of literature among the liberal arts.*
Reading/Writing Assignments
One manuscript per week submitted. Reading of other students’ submissions in advance of the workshop in which they are to be discussed. Other assigned readings and exercises. 30-80 pages of reading per week.
* Section 2 with Professor Paul Muldoon has a special focus, Poetry and Protest:
“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” wrote W.B. Yeats, “out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” Yet Yeats himself felt obliged to become directly involved in the political life of Ireland and to write poems that function in ways that are at once heartfelt and heard above the din. As poets of the 21st century, are we once again obliged to reconsider our function? This course is based on the long tradition of poems protesting injustice — political, sexual, racial — with assignments drawing from the anonymous woman author of Wulf and Eadwacer, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Nikki Giovanni, Wislawa Szymborska, Joy Harjo, and Carolyn Forche.
