CRW 3311-0003 - Fall 2026 - Roach

This course explores poetic technique by discovering, developing, and deploying your literary lineage and literary landscape. With poetry as a constant, we will explore the roots and the reach of the lyric, approaching it as a living practice shaped by memory, storytelling, and cultural inheritance. Together we will study how poets develop a lyric “eye”: a way of seeing, listening, and translating experience into language. Through close reading, discussion, and generative writing exercises, students will explore core elements of poetic craft including image, voice, line, syntax, rhythm, and metaphor. The course will engage poetry as both art and method—examining how poets work across documentary poetics, personal narrative, and hybrid forms of storytelling to witness, record, and reimagine lived experience. Students will encounter poetry not only as literature but as a mode of inquiry, a form of archival practice, and a method of world-making. Throughout the semester, students will experiment with a range of poetic strategies and forms while developing their own lyric voice and literary landscape. Workshops and revision practices will emphasize attentive reading, craft awareness, and thoughtful feedback. By the end of the course, students will produce a small portfolio of poems that demonstrate an evolving understanding of poetic technique, literary lineage, and the lyric as a practice of storytelling.