What international poets can teach American poets
This course is a writing workshop with a difference. Instead of repeating what we already know, by drawing from our limited stock of experience, we will explore alternate music, order, dance steps, and beauties by reading and hearing international, non-English poets and poetry, to learn from them something new about our own writing. Our assumption is that what is our own is not as important as what is good. By means of foreign-language work we expand and deepen ourselves and our language, get out of ourselves, our old habits, and conventional influences. The method will be to read poets in translation— emphasizing Asian poetry and non-Western languages—then attempt “imitations” and emulations of style, subject, voice, etc. You’ll be surprised.
“Poetry’s task is to increase the available stock of reality.”
—Blackmur
When cutting an axe handle with an axe,
surely the model is at hand.
—Lu Chi (261-303 ce)
The emphasis will be on reading and writing poetry, and not on translation theory. We will be working with non-English poetry, not on it. Knowledge of a foreign language is not required; what’s needed is a strong commitment to writing and re-imagining poetry in order to free us from our invisible cages.
This is a seminar course, so each student will make presentations and lead the class discussion at various times. Class discussion of student poetry. Open to all graduate students, but those who are actively writing poetry (and maybe prose, but not “theory”) will benefit from it. The outcome will be a portfolio of poems written during the semester and a meditation on poetics.
Outcomes:
Advanced knowledge of poetics of international poets
Advanced understanding of writing and reading poetry
Increased understanding of students’ own writing and poetics
Advanced written and oral ability to contextualize students’ own work and that of a cross section of international poets and poetry.
Books to be announced