First-Year Studies in Poetry: Poetic Form/Forming Poetry

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Radial, bilateral, transverse: symmetries that change over a life; radical asymmetries. Sea shells unfurl by Fibonacci. Horn, bark, petal: hydrocarbon chains arrange in every conceivable strut, winch, and pylon, ranging over the visible spectrum and beyond into ultraviolet and infrared. Horseshoe crab, butterfly, barnacle, and millipede all belong to the same phylum. Earthworms with seven hearts, ruminants with multiple stomachs, scallops with a line of eyes rimming their shell like party lanterns, animals with two brains, many brains, none. —Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations This course will be part workshop and part an exploration of reading and writing in established, evolving, and invented forms. Featuring essays on form by contemporary poets, we will use An Exaltation of Forms, edited by Annie Finch and Katherine Varnes, alongside books by a wide array of poets and visual artists to facilitate and further these discussions. Students will direct language through the sieves and sleeves of the haiku, sonnet, prose poem, ghazal, haibun, and more. THE CURRICULUM 18 Expect to move fluidly between iambic pentameter, erasures, comic poems, and the lipogram (in which students will not be allowed to use a particular letter of the alphabet in their poem). Students should expect to complicate their notion of what “a poem in form” is. We will utilize in-class writing exercises and prompts. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. First-Year Studies in Poetry: West/ East at Night