10:30 AM to 11:45 AM TR
Innovation Hall 336
Section Information for Fall 2018
Requirement & Prerequisite: This course is required of BFA students in Poetry. ENGH 396 (Introduction to Creative Writing), is a prerequisite.
We’ll begin by exploring what the term form connotes for us. How do each of us, in our current poetry practices, go about finding, fighting, feeding, or feeling around for form? How do our individual senses of form, and, more generally, our knowledge of poetic craft, inform our reading of others’ work? What forms are at play in the other domains of our lives: dance, music, television or film, cooking, or conversation? To what extent does form dictate content in these realms, and to what extend does content find form, in the hands of the maker and/or artist?Over the course of the semester, we’ll read about and experiment with various types of meter, received forms (the “golden shovel,” inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry, and the pantoum, to name a few), and generative formal ideas. Along the way, we’ll consider how each poem, even one considered free verse “embodies the energy of the gesture of its making,” to quote Robert Hass. Each week, we’ll share the poems we’ve made based on the prior week’s reading and conversation. Toward the end of the term, each student will share observations on a form from outside the poetic domain: the organization of an album, the structure of something the student has knitted, or the design for a transistor radio, for example, alongside a poem they’ve written inspired by that formal dynamic. We will approach poetic form as a way to play with time; to amplify, distort, or otherwise use or make sing the music of language; and further, as a highly intuitive facility you may nurture and then call on as you enter, and thus alter, the very old and very new conversation of poetry.
Reading List:
An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of their Art, Eds. Annie Finch & Kathrine Varnes
Incendiary Art, Patricia Smith
Olives, A. E. Stallings
Credits: 3
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