Poetry: Patience as Practice

Catalog description

In “Poetry and Ambition, Donald Hall writes, “Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don’t let them go, don’t publish them…by that time, you ought to have them right.” In this Critical Practice course we will consider patience, an essential component of poetic composition, as practice. Patience, in this context, is the difficult and demanding work of revision. Students will hone their critical skills through close readings of poems and the drafts that made those poems possible, and in prose responses to reading assignments. Texts from which readings will be assigned include Black Lightning: Poetry-in-Progress and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets.