Modern Poetry: Craft and Revolution

Catalog description

This course thrusts students headlong into the dark cobwebby interiors of the modern poem. We look at several revolutions in thinking about what poems are, beginning in England in 1798, coming to Walt Whitman's and Emily Dickinson's America in the 1850s, stopping in Harlem in the 1920s, and ending up online. We look at how modern poems are actually put together, considering such elemental concerns as image, voice, and structure. And we also write our own poems, sometimes with these examples as our models. Students leave this course with a deeper understanding of the lineage of the modern poem and what makes the modern poem go, as well as, thanks to the generous and critical attentions of the workshop, the same understanding of their own work.