CRW 5331 Fall 2021 Kirby

In A Few Good Voices in My Head, Ted Solotaroff says that a piece of writing is a writer’s “only way to organize and to some extent comprehend life’s fullness and perplexity.” In this class we’ll be studying and writing that kind of poem in a format that departs from the traditional workshop set-up. There’s nothing wrong with sitting in a circle and passing poems around and discussing them, but here we’ll mainly be studying craft in the first month and, after that, alternating between select students giving 20-minute readings of their work to the rest of the class and roundtable discussions of additional craft issues and particular poems presented by individual students. Expect to write a poem a week and, when you’re not sharing it with the class, sending it to the instructor. Expect as well to partner with someone with whom you’ll swap poems weekly and also exchange portfolios in the last week of class. The result? More fully realized and engaging poems. By the way, I call this class “The Solotaroff Protocol” because that sounds vaguely like a Cold War thriller involving a protagonist who (a) starts with a plan that (b) quickly goes awry even though (c) things work out in the end if (d) not in the way anyone thought they would. You know, the way poems do.