CRW 5331-0001 - Spring 2026 - Hamby

"Poetic sequences in all their different forms have been explored by poets from the beginning of writing until the present day. In this class we will spend the first hour discussing the different approaches to the sequence. Starting with Ovid and Horace we will move through time and look at Keats’s odes, Emily Dickinson’s fascicles, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and end up with Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Diane Seuss’s Frank: Sonnets, Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins, and Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things, a new collection of prose poems. The final two hours of the class will be devoted to workshop. In no way will you be expected to write a sequence. Every poet will write one poem a week and write a 500-word response to the readings. The final project is a portfolio of your strongest work. Please contact me if you have any questions. "