Form & Theory of Poetry

Our books are Mark Strand and Eavan Boland’s THE MAKING OF A
POEM, Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris’ THE ECCO ANTHOLOGY OF INTERNATIONAL
POETRY, and C. D. Wrights’s ONE WITH OTHERS, available at Revolution Books.

We’ll look at the origins of poetry in ritual and myth, a
long-running ambivalence toward poetry as world-creator or total impossibility,
a tension between aesthetics and politics, traditional forms and
non-traditional forms (including poetry in hybrid genres such as
Wright’s).  Students will write in most
of the genres we read, including creation of persona poems in voices other than
the writer’s own.  Students will also
write a few 1-2-page analytic commentaries on the literature.  You must come to class and participate
(believe me, you’ll want to!).