Poetry of Inclusion

This poetry workshop will explore ways in which poems can be models for ethical living. Specifically we will consider pluralism in form and content and pluralism as both means and end in the making of contemporary poetry. That is, we will analyze poems and consider in our own poems, when possible, ways in which aesthetics can enact the ethic of pluralism. Among other concerns, we will discuss polymodality, multi-voicing, parataxis and collage as the means by which we understand wider ethical and emotional constructs. We will spend a fair amount of time focusing on specific poems as well as sequences and whole collections from a variety of poets such as: Rukeyser, Hass, Levis, CD Wright, Flynn, Rankine among others. While we are writing “in conversation” with this material, we will also be investigating how this material may or may not be conversant with notions of sincerity and authenticity. The course could be summed up as a series of questions: Is one more real by embracing the other or is that all just noise? Is noise a kind of music or a distraction? Are we singular and intense or expansive and intimate? Are we veins or fields? Do we lack both when we lack one?