CRW 5331 Spring 2023 Hamby

How does a poet put together a book? My first book was made up of three sequences, as were my second and third books. A sequence can be tied together by form or subject or both. I have found it to be a very productive way of working and so have many poets. During the craft hour we will look at a wide historical range of poetic sequences and discuss their strategies. We’ll start with a selection from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and then move on to Horace’s Odes, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady Sonnets, Keats’s Odes, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Anne Sexton’s Transformations, Sylvia Plath’s bee sequence from Ariel, Allen Ginsberg's “Kaddish,” Joseph Brodsky’s “Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots,” Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, and Diane Suess’s Frank. Most of the readings will be posted on Canvas. For the workshop you are more than welcome to work on a sequence, but you are free to follow your muse.