If you love somebody and you think you can say so, you’re thinking in prose.
If you love somebody so much that you’re discovering you can’t say so, you’re thinking in poetry.
The difference begin to show when you try to say why and how you love. Prose uses words as labels for the contents of thought. It asks you to cut right to the thought, or what they taught you in high school to call the message. Poetry makes you realize that you can’t separate a message from its messenger. The dictionary meaning of a word matters in poetry just the way it does in prose, but in addition poetry reminds you that words have sounds the way music does, and associations with other words and their sounds. They’re like people that way. And you’ll see when you learn in this course how to experience words that way: the better you get at noticing words, the better you’ll get at loving them — and loving in general.
Text: The Norton Anthology of Poetry
Two exams, a five-page paper, and a final. We’ll also be doing some technical exercises with verse form, and one more big assignment will be for you to write a sonnet. That one will be graded pass-fail, for technical accuracy only and with infinite rewrites allowed until it takes off its training wheels and passes.