Writing Poetry in a Global Context

Catalog description

This introductory creative writing class, structured as a weekly workshop, will help students understand the genre of poetry and help guide them in writing and revising their own poetry in English. The lecturer will assign readings of poems by major poets in outstanding English translations, representing various traditions/countries, from a number of sources including Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, in order to discuss literary elements inherent to poetry as well as the role of translation, and to place the reading and writing of poetry in an international context. The readings will underscore the correspondences among various poets (e.g., Whitman?s influence on Neruda; Williams?s on Latino poetry), translators (e.g., Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Charles Simic, Mark Strand as translators of Latin American/ European poets), and poetic traditions from around the globe. Students will be assigned written exercises developed from those readings in order for them to employ elements such as imagery, voice, rhythm, form, and theme in their creative texts; these texts will be addressed and critiqued in open class discussions. There will be a midterm project and a final project that will consist of groupings of complete poems. The goals of the course are to encourage students to discover and develop their unique poetic voices, and to help guide them toward crafting fully realized poems that express universality across cultures.