In this graduate poetry workshop, I hope to provide a safe, generative space in which to discuss your work, while engaging in challenging and intellectually inquisitive conversations about poetics and how we as artists respond in the hands of history. These global questions come up in all my workshops when we are discussing individual poems; during this time of pandemic and racial reckoning, I want to put them at beginning of my course description, not because I’d ever you require to write about any particular subject, including our political and cultural moment, but because I want to acknowledge where we are and to encourage experimentation, which might involve crossing the boundaries of genre into hybridity. Alicia Ostriker writes of her book, The Mother/Child Papers, “it…is an experimental work for me, in the sense of posing formal problems correlative to moral ones.” This is what I call the Ostriker Formal Moral Correlative. I have a thesis that urgent subject matter quests for its form and genre. For me, that has meant ranging between sonnets, free verse, prose poems, flash non-fiction, zuihitsu, haibun, and engaging in hybridity, genre bending, or genre dissolving. I assign the two volume Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellman, and Robert O’Clair (or another comprehensive anthology). I advise graduate students to own this two-volume set because I think it’s indispensable, especially for exams. The poetics section at the back of each volume is most useful. This edition is more diverse than previous editions, though the length of the selections reinscribe gender, ethnic, and racial disparities. As an editor myself, I want you at once to have a sense of the canon, to question it, and, I hope one day, to take up the mantle of reforming it for future. To this end, the greater part of our reading calendar is student generated; each student chooses a poet and a poetics essay, and does a short presentation with an eye toward enriching our workshop vocabulary and deepening how we situate ourselves in the poetic dialogue across time. I also assign Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry because I think it is the best guide to sound. This is a workshop, and we will limit the time we spend on discussing reading, yet I find we have the most productive sessions workshopping when we develop a vocabulary together based on our readings of poetry and poetics, and describe how our own poetics and artistic process are transformed by our reading. The premise here is that we write poetry in dialogue with the poets of the past, present, and future. Each of us will bring a lexicon to the table enriched both by what we read in common and on our own. Each member of the workshop will do two oral reports, one from the Modern volume and one from the Contemporary, that deals with one poet and that poet’s poetics essay or an essay that would apply that poet. Writing assignments include turning in approximately a poem a week for a total of twelve and a final project. I like to have a generative component to the workshop. I’ll introduce you to some of my writing games, and we can come up with some together, as well. I will encourage us to experiment with short form prose poetry, which could include zuihitsu and haibun, and translations ranging from more strict translation to imitations to translations from one era to another (for example, an Anne Bradstreet poem in contemporary English). All these writing possibilities will depend on you and your interests. We will spend the first part of the workshop on generating work, and the last weeks (a week for each of you) on manuscripts. Depending on where you are in your manuscript development, we’d discuss either a full-length book manuscript (42+ pages) or a chapbook length one (12-22 pages). Students who are not in the creative writing program or who write in another genre and who would feel more comfortable with another kind of final writing project are welcome to propose one. Why is there such a proliferation of short form prose in contemporary writing? Why have so many short form prose journals sprung up? How does one distinguish between the genres of short form prose? Or can one? Why have genre blending, dissolving, and hybridity become such important terms in discourse about writing? What influence does the internet have on the short form’s appeal? Is the short form a response to our sometimes overwhelming access to information, arts, sciences, and social interaction in the digital universe? Or it this a question of shortened attention spans? Has the internet facilitated genre blending in short form writing and the visual arts, including comics and film? Or to ask a corollary question, how has the internet opened possibilities for multi-genre projects that incorporate short form prose and visual and musical arts? What role do blogs play? How have translation and internationalism contributed to the short form, as in the Japanese forms, zuihitzu and haibun? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, how do you situate yourselves as critics or creative writer/critics and what vision do you have for the future? We will consider all these questions, using your short form literary critical essays (500-750 words) as springboards for class discussion. Apart from introductions to anthologies of these various short forms, there is very little scholarship that deals with short form prose, which presents us with an opportunity to come up with a short form critical vocabulary.