CRW 5331 Spring 2020 Hamby

How does a poet write a long poem? Homer, Dante, and Milton did it, but in the last two hundred years poets have turned to sequences to write a longer poem. The first hour of our class will be devoted to discussing a sequence by one poet with the emphasis on strategies for plundering the piece for your own work. We'll begin with Shakespeare's Dark Lady Sonnets and end with Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins. Other poets will be Keats, Rimbaud, Whitman, Dickinson, Sexton, Plath, Ginsberg, and Anne Carson.

The final two hours of the class will be a workshop of your original poems with a new poem due each week. Two weeks after I return the poems with my comments, a revision is due. In workshop I like to emphasize the nurturing of each student's poetic voice rather than reaching for an abstract perfect poem. Taking risks is encouraged.