LIT 2030.002 Fall 2023 Seu

Diane Seuss’ poem Eclipse begins “The moon is losing / herself.” By looking at both traditional and contemporary poets we will divine ways to find, lose and loose ourselves. The class will require rigorous amounts of reading and the close study of individual poems. We will be conducting rounds of workshop where students turn in their own work and respond to one another’s. The class is largely discussion based. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever read poetry before as long as you arrive willing to be, yourself, shattered by line break and transformed by metaphor. Rumi, writing in 1200 BC wrote “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, / there is a field. I’ll meet you there. // When the soul lies down in that grass, / the world is too full to talk about. / Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ / doesn’t make any sense.” About 600 years later Whitman wrote that grass is the “uncut hair of graves, […] The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it.” We will be seeking to lie down in the grassy fields of the vast unknown.