In this section of Advanced Poetry, we’ll focus on the role that building community plays in our lives as writers and the central position that poetic “voice” holds in one’s journey as a developing poet. As Mary Ruefle puts it her 2022 address delivered at the Bennington Writing Seminars Commencement, “Writing is not what you do, it’s who you are.” Reading those words, I feel something like a frantic energy turning over in my body, from a pit in my stomach, rising up through my shoulders and neck, to the top of my head and back of my skull. That feeling is how I know that, for me at least, in this moment at least, Ruefle is right. Writing, for a writer, is who you are. And under the intricately and necessarily intersocial conditions of being a human being, who you are is profoundly tied to others who are, the others around you, influencing you, being influenced by you. For this reason, I see community building as a powerful and radical way towards defining each of our lives as writers, as poets. In this class, interaction with your community will be the foundation for everything else we do. We’ll read together, write together, laugh together, be sad together, experiment and explore and prod and try our best to grow together “as writers,” which for us, might as well mean “as people.”

And “voice.” I’ve been fascinated by the concept of poetic voice for as long as I’ve wanted to be a poet, though at the beginning I didn’t quite realize that’s what it was that fascinated me. What makes a poem the poem it is? What makes a poet the poet they are? When we close read a poem, we can break it down into its technical elements—the enjambment, meter, and cadence, the imagery and metaphor constructions, the sonic qualities it employs, the assonance, the alliteration, the development of the narrative, the use of abstraction, the positionality of the speaker—and that’s a more-than-worthwhile endeavor (and we’ll absolutely do it). But for me, there’s still something mysterious lurking behind it all. I suspect it has to do with “voice.” I won’t try to define it here, because I don’t think I can do so adequately. Instead, I’ll ask each of you to help me discover something about it throughout the course of the class, and hopefully along the way, spend time developing and learning about your own poetic voice.

These are the frameworks for this section of Advanced Poetry. Within this, we’ll spend time reading books of poetry by several major authors, including Diane Seuss, Patricia Smith, and Jericho Brown. We’ll have generative and collaborative writing time focused on enjoying and celebrating the act of writing poetry. We’ll close read poems, discuss essays on poetry craft and theory, and BE POETS, whatever that happens to mean on a given day. The workshop component for the class will give everyone an opportunity to share their own writing and listen as the class reads, enjoys, and discusses it. I’ll do my best to make sure that the workshop is “generative” rather than “corrective” – that is, the workshop space will be a space to learn about ourselves and our peers as writers, aiming for further generation of poetry, rather than trying to “fix” a submitted poem like you might fix your busted bicycle chain or finicky air conditioning.

In the end, we’ll have spent time exploring as many of the exciting different moving parts of “being a poet” as we can—from the writing and the reading to the community building and outreach, and everything we can find in between. I look forward to taking the journey with you, alongside you. I’m excited and grateful for the opportunity.