Poetry Workshop: Kitchen Sink Poetics

Catalog description

“Lacks one, lacks both,” Whitman says. “Just throw in the kitchen sink, why don’t ya,” my mother used to say. This is a poetry-writing wonder romp through a series of polar tensions that pervade modern and contemporary poetry. Through exercises, readings, and your own work, we will explore a variety of dichotomies/tensions that might enable us to engage our poems with a greater sense of presence and emotional possession. Occasion and directionality, intensity and intimacy, figure and ground, THE CURRICULUM 198 speech and writing, line and syntax, structure and body, eye and I...there are plenty of concepts and mechanics, concerns of craft and art, to throw into this course. Are they false dichotomies? Sure, but falsity has its own use; and the central use of falsity is to move us toward truth, to inhabit, to nest there. Primarily, we will be investigating and claiming the best ways that serve our poems—our sense of belonging with poetry—that either narrow our concern or expand our vision, or both. Poetry Workshop: Making the Familiar Strange