This is a workshop that focuses on generating poetry rather than critiquing it and on reading, viewing, and listening to poetry and poetics. By the time you finish this course, I want you to have a little chapbook of your poems and a full notebook with material that may turn into something later on. My formula, Play + Practice = Work is based on my own process and experience, as well as established theory and research about how we write. Because writing is a form of thought experimentation in which we make unexpected discoveries, in order to write, you need to be a free child playing to learn and explore. You need to practice writing in the same way that an athlete trains, an actor rehearses, a musician or a dancer practices technique, or a painter does quick gestures to warm up. If you call on your inner child to write often, you’ll become freer and freer at that same time that you'll develop technique and you’ll hardwire your brain to enter the territory where poetry dwells. Even revision involves the formula Play + Practice = Work. Revision calls on your inner critic while you “re-vision,” which is a new kind of freedom. I will guide you through creating a revision practice that is gentle, accepting, and considers whether the poem is ready to be lifted out of your notebook to the keyboard and screen. 

I find we have the most productive discussions about your poems 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.

Required writing includes freewriting together in our workshop community, brief weekly pieces in which you'll engage in self-reflection and intention setting, and a final project that includes a preface, a table of contents, and 12 pieces that you feel are reading for an audience. The final project can go beyond typescript and you can make a multimedia piece that includes visual art, music, and various forms of digital storytelling.

Texts & Materials

Required

1. Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1999). ISBN-10: 0374526176, ISBN-13: 978-0374526177.
2. Various texts that are itemized in the reading calendar, many of which come from The Poetry Foundation website, a wide-ranging and diverse resource.
3. A pen or pencil that you love and a nice notebook with paper that you love.

Recommendation:

Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair, editors, The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, two volumes. I believe that the two-volume Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellman, and Robert O’Clair is the best comprehensive anthology of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics that has engaged in the crucial work of diversifying the canon. I assign it to graduate students, with their comprehensive exams in mind. The poetics section at the back of each volume is very useful. My hope is that 1) you will find it an excellent investment and indispensable part of your poetry collection; 2) you will also think of it as your strong foundation from which you can critique and reform the canon.