Bizarre Craft: A Workshop in Poetry and Short Prose
What draws us to the strange, the unusual, and the uncanny? In this creative writing workshop you will be encouraged to approach writing poetry and short prose that leads your reader into the unexpected. We will read texts that employ erasures, excavations, stream of consciousness, and “found” language to mentor us on our way into the curious and unfamiliar.
As a class we will use these methods to texture our language and to push our own poetic capabilities to the brink of our imaginations and then off the edge. The goal is for you, the student, to create prose and poems that excite and reflect the bizarre using some of the processes we will examine.
Students will be required to enter the realm of writing the senses with a twist to produce original work based on weekly writing assignments to be workshopped by the class. Students will also be expected to maintain a portfolio project and a reading journal that will chart the weird and the eccentric in the poems and short prose that we will encounter as a class.
Some of the texts that we will read include poets and writers like Bashō, Kimiko Hahn, Linda Hogan, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Carolyn Forche, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Tarfia Faizullah, Benjamin Landry, Agha Shahid Ali, Catherine Bowman, Cynthia Cruz, and Ocean Vuong.