CRW 3311 - Spring 2025 - Watkins

When most people think of poetry, they think of a nature poem. But as ecopoet Juliana Spahr writes, “even when [the nature poet] got the birds and the plants and the animals right, they tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat.” This course offers students the opportunity to consider both the bird and the bulldozer. In this class, students will write and workshop poems, read contemporary poetry collections such as Craig Santos Perez's "Habitat Threshold" and Natalie Diaz's "Postcolonial Love Poem," and will discuss the long history of nature poetry with a focus on contemporary ecopoetics. Though the course will focus on ecopoetry, the poetic concepts learned here can be applied to any kind of writing (we'll study form, the line, image, etc.); students already versed in writing poetry and those with little or no experience will both benefit. Likewise, students of literature are encouraged to join as the course offers as much benefit to students' literary skills as to their writing.