First-Year Studies: Exploring Voice, Image, and Form in Poetry

What makes a line? What makes an image? How do you mold a poetic form that best captures the self? Part poetry workshop and part intensive reading discussion class, we will first explore poetry's traditional foundations of line, image, form, and voice and then learn how to adventurously expand upon the fundamentals. In the first semester, we will explore voice and its many masks of alter ego, persona, monologue, and apostrophe. We will broaden our ideas on the poetic line by working with a spectrum of forms from sonnets, ghazals, and sestinas to prose poems. To help oil our imaginative rig, we will read William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Aga Shahid Ali, and others. In the second semester, we will expand upon the poetic foundations that we have learned by reading poets from the avant-garde tradition such as Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Harryette Mullen, and Lyn Hejinian. We will write ars poeticas (poems that are about what poems should be or do), collage sound poems, serialized poems, and homophonic translations. In addition, we will develop our critical poetic vocabulary through a series of workshops, reading discussions, and critical assignments. Expect to write a poem a week generated from writing assignments, as well as reading a book a week. At the end of the year, we will revise and gather the poems that we have written and compile our own chapbooks.