Techniques in Poetry: Poetry, Media, and the Body

POETRY, MEDIA & THE BODY

ENG 716 Seminar in Techniques in Contemporary Literature: Techniques in Poetry

Spring 2025 / Monday 6-8:30pm / In person / KUY 409

Kumu: Noʻu Revilla (she/her)                                   Office Location: Kuykendall 719

Email: nrevilla@hawaii.edu (1-2 days response)      Student Hours: TUE, 2-3pm via Zoom

 

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION

The body is water.

The body is skin.

The body is instinct, viscera, and muscle memory.

In poetry, the body has also served as muse, instrument, archive, and witness across time and space. This course aims to examine not just the role of the body in one’s creative practice but also the necessary question of whose bodies are consistently included and excluded from the story of who is human. As the world is increasingly defined by war, censorship, and artificial intelligence, it is imperative we slow down and examine how our bodies are responding. How do poets chronicle the body? In what ways do these stories inspire connection, courage, and change?

Our study of such poetry will be guided by pairings of canonical and contemporary works in both full-length and excerpted forms. For example, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975) and Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals (1980) will be in conversation with the all-Pasifika spoken word production She Who Dies to Live (2019). Marlon T. Riggs’ experimental documentary film Tongues Untied (1989) will be in conversation with writings by Danez Smith and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Since writing about our bodies also means writing about the bodies that made it possible for us to exist, we will place excerpts of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982)  in conversation with Monica Ong’s Silent Anatomies (2015) to help us navigate questions like: How do we write about our dead? How does poetry enact ancestral conversations? The poetic projects we will engage represent a range of aesthetic and critical legacies that have grappled with issues of gender, race, sexuality, citizenship, language, body and/as land, body and/as water, and genealogy. 

Reinvigorating our attention to the physical body will also expand the ways we understand poetic techniques and inhabit form. The class format will be a mix of lecture, creative writing, and discussion, with pairs of students leading discussion each week. For your final project, you have the option of writing either an artist statement (1,000 words) and chapbook of poems (20-30 pages) OR a conference paper (2,000 – 2,500 words, including Works Cited) and a book review (800-1,000 words). A major goal of this course is for students to refine and articulate their poetics with their bodies in mind.

For students who are writing creative theses or dissertations, this course is designed to help you prepare for specific requirements, such as the area exam portfolio and critical introduction of your thesis/dissertation. Even if you are new to or in the early stages of your graduate program, this course will be generative. For students who are not writing creative theses or dissertations, this course will energize your scholarship with expressive tools, creative modes of inquiry, and a regular writing community. All writers are welcome!

 

Some early questions of the course include: What does your body remember? What is your body forgetting? When do you trust your body the most? Why? What leads to distrust? When it comes to your body (and the bodies of others), do you embellish, exaggerate, lie? What one true thing can you write about your body right now? What would you feel more comfortable writing – a sex scene or a fight scene? Why? Do you see your body represented in literature? If you were to write a biography of your body, what would it say? What stories have been written on or through your body? How does your body receive, refuse, and innovate these stories? How is your body contained and disciplined by different systems of power? How does poetry create against this? How do the poets we study recalibrate prevailing notions of gender, race, disability, desire, invasion and occupation? Writing about our bodies also means writing about the bodies that made it possible for our bodies to exist. How do we write about our dead? How does poetry enact ancestral conversations? What poetic modes and forms have been most successful with writing the body – lyric, erasure, sonnet, villanelle? How?

 

 

COURSE EXPENSES

Majority of the course readings will be available as PDFs or hyperlinks via Laulima. Students are also required to have a dedicated course notebook and a pen or pencil for every class and the following books in their print forms:

  • ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED: Monica Ong, Silent Anatomies, Kore Press, 2015
  • POTENTIALLY REQUIRED: Charles Finn and Kim Stafford, eds., The Art of Revising Poetry: 21 Poets on their Drafts, Craft, and Process, Bloomsbury, 2023
  • POTENTIALLY REQUIRED: Fox Frazier-Foley and Diana Artesian, eds., Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics, Ricochet Editions, 2016

 

 

Major Assignments

  • Six writing experiments
  • Regular Laulima discussion posts (300-500 words)
  • Co-lead a class discussion in pairs (30-45 minutes)
  • Presentation & contribution to collaborative list of lit journals & magazines
  • Group memorization and recitation at the end of the semester
  • Final Project (creative or critical option)