CRW 4320-Fall 2025-Wilson

In this course, we will move beyond parsing the important, intricate details of prosody you’ve ideally encountered in CRW 3311 (and possibly other sections of CRW 4320) and write into and against modes and schools of thought that dominate contemporary poetics, particularly our intense moment of hypervisibility and hyperviolence. We will focus not only on refining the single “perfect poem” but also curating a series of poems whose speakers’ voices we can modulate to interrogate personal and cultural history and memory with greater veracity. We will attend to the ways that the performance of race, gender, and nationality contemporize and transform the ancient elegy and other modes of writing. To achieve this ambitious feat, rather than reading several books, we will spend the better part of the semester studying these modes and schools vis-à-vis representative writers over successive fortnights before reading two new collections as exemplary models of our aim of producing a small poetry collection.