CRW 5331 Spring 2024

“It takes me so long to formulate a thought worthy of articulation, and it takes me a long time to articulate my opinions in a form worthy to call thought,” C.D. Wright said in a 2014 conversation with Sharon Olds and Juan Felipe Herrera, fellow chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, about revision. In two years, she would leave us to sort out how she was able over several collections to constellate a host of speakers who were at once “one big self”—many-throated and polyphonic yet singularly searing—and “one with others.” This semester, ideally building on the work we’ve begun in other recent workshops focused on poetic series, we will further refine and situate our own as we examine the twenty-first-century intersections of the epic, pastoral, and elegiac traditions through a host of first and second books and historicize their lineages. In addition to Wright’s One Big Self, other model collections we’ll read may include: Kemi Alabi’s Against Heaven, Danielle Cadena Deulan’s Desire Museum, Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, Edgar Kunz’s Fixer, C.T. Salazar’s Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking, Phillip B. Williams’s MUTINY, Paul Tran’s All the Flowers Kneeling, and Tiphanie Yanique’s Wife.