CRW 5331 Hamby Spring 2021

In the craft element of this workshop (the first hour) will discuss the ode, which is often defined as a poem of praise on an elevated subject. It may have started out that way but was turned on its head by the Romantics and Walt Whitman and then turned again by Pablo Neruda. We’ll start the class with Sumerian odes translated from cuneiform texts, then move on to the Psalms and Song of Solomon, Pindar, Horace, Pindarmania in Renaissance England, the English Romantics, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Neruda’s Odas Elemenatles, and then twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers of odes, including Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Yusef Komuyakaa, Kenneth Koch, Sharon Olds, and poets writing odes today. I’m gathering new poems all the time.

The second part of the class (two hours) will be workshop in which we will read and discuss your original work. You do not have to write odes. I like to create a nurturing workshop in which we all work to make your poems as strong as possible. I also look for patterns in your work and your voice that will help you shape your MFA thesis or creative dissertation. We will have two conferences, one early in the semester and one later.