The Distinctive Poetic Voice

Contemporary poets face a dazzling range of stylistic options. This course is designed to help you develop not just your own ear and voice but your own sense of craft, intuition, technique, and experiment. We will focus primarily and profoundly humanistically on students’ own work, with the knowledge that a mistake in art can be fascinating and the demonstration of competence can be irrelevant. We will also look at poets from Anne Carson to Elizabeth Bishop to Basho. Students will be encouraged to orient themselves and find their own directions in the labyrinth of modern poetic practice. We’ll study prosody, metrics, the lyric and epic voices—but the emphasis will be on students’ own creative projects. Expect to write every week, read voraciously, and create a portfolio of six to 12 poems.