Poetry Writing: Sparking Creativity, Generating New Work

Fall 2012: POET 08 Tuesdays, 6:30 -- 9:20 pm 10 weeks, September 25 -- December 4 (No class on November 20) Peter Kline Office Hours: By appointment

General Information:

Texts The Complete Poems 1927-1979, Elizabeth Bishop (ISBN 0374518173) The Wild Iris, Louise Glück (ISBN 978-0880013345) The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, Kay Ryan (ISBN 978-0802145215) Satin Cash, Lisa Russ Spaar (ISBN 978-0892553433) Sestets: Poems, Charles Wright (ISBN 978-0374532147)

Course Objectives Sometimes creativity just needs a little spark to make it catch fire. Through a multitude of fun and unexpected writing exercises, this course is intended to start conflagrations. At the same time, students will be challenged to fundamentally reimagine what their poems can be. This stimulating course, which is suitable for beginning and experienced poets alike, is designed to help students to produce new work and experiment with different ways of writing poems. The class will be structured around a series of writing exercises and assignments, from dramatic monologues to “cliché poems,” each designed to teach students a particular principle of poetry writing. We will also share the best of our results in a supportive workshop setting. Reading for the course will include a wide range of modern and contemporary poetry, including Elizabeth Bishop, Kay Ryan, Louise Glück and Charles Wright. We’ll finish the course with a celebratory poetry reading in the last class.

Course Grading You have three options: 1.) No Grade Requested (this is the default option) 2.) If you elect to Credit/No Credit, attendance will determine your grade 3.) If you elect to obtain a letter grade, your final portfolio will account for 100% of your grade.

Workshop and Poem Assignments The idea of the workshop-based class is to help students learn to revise their own poems and to give constructive feedback about the poems of others. Students up for workshop should submit their poems with one copy for the instructor and a copy for each of the workshop participants. Students should also provide written feedback each week on the poems of other students being workshopped.

Final Portfolio Each student seeking credit in the course will compile a portfolio of 4 significant revisions of poems written during the course of the semester. The portfolio should include both the final revision and the original draft of each poem. The final portfolio will be due in class on Tuesday, December 4th, 2012.

Tuesday, September 25th Clichés, Puns, and Expressions Reading – Kay Ryan – “Dogleg,” “Extraordinary Lengths,” “When Fishing Fails,” “All Shall Be Restored,” “Full Measure,” “Bestiary,” “Say Uncle,” “Corners,” “Blandeur,” “Coming and Going,” “The Fabric of Life,” “It’s Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn,” “Lime Light,” “Drops in the Bucket,” “Water Under the Bridge,” “Home to Roost,” “The Elephant in the Room,” “The Best of It,” “The Other Shoe,” “Tired Blood,” “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard”

Tuesday, October 2nd Poem #1 Due Building a Better Bestiary: Animal Poems Reading – Kay Ryan – “Flamingo Watching,” “The Hinge of Spring,” “Deer,” “Snake Charm,” “Paired Things,” “Osprey,” “Turtle,” “Living with Stripes,” “To the Young Anglerfish,” “Mockingbird,” “The Excluded Animals,” “Grazing Horses,” “Chop,” “Felix Crow,” “Theft” Elizabeth Bishop – “Sandpiper,” “Rainy Season; Subtropics,” “Pink Dog”

Tuesday, October 9th Poems of Love and Friendship Reading – Elizabeth Bishop – “The Weed,” “Sleeping on the Ceiling,” “Sleeping Standing Up,” “Insomnia,” “Letter to N.Y.” “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” “The Shampoo,” “Song,” “One Art,” “The End of March,” “North Haven”

Tuesday, October 16th Poem #2 Due Formalities Reading – Elizabeth Bishop – “Large Bad Picture,” “Cirque d’Hiver,” “Roosters,” “Varick Street,” “Arrival at Santos,” “The Armadillo,” “Sestina,” “Visits to St. Elizabeths,” “The Moose,” “Sonnet”

Tuesday, October 23rd Further Formal Experiments: Sestets Reading – Charles Wright – “Future Tense,” “Cowboy Up,” “Hasta la Vista Buckaroo,” “Celestial Waters,” “Sunlight Bets on the Come,” “Consolation and the Order of the World,” “The Song from the Other Side of the World,” “The Gospel According to Yours Truly,” “’It’s Sweet to Be Remembered,’” “Yellow Wings,” “Next,” “When Horses Gallop Away from Us…” “Time Is a Graceless Enemy…” “On the Night of First Snow…” “Time Is a Dark Clock…” “Like the New Moon, My Mother Drifts…” “Hovercraft”

Tuesday, October 30th Poem #3 Due Ars Poetica Reading – Charles Wright – Continue to work through Sestets, concentrating on “Tomorrow,” “No Entry,” “Outscape,” “Homage to What’s-His-Name,” “Tutti Frutti,” “’This World Is Not My Home, I’m Only Passing Through,’” “’I Shall Be Released,’” “Description’s the Art of Something or Other,” “Basin Creek Sundown,” “In Memory of the Natural World,” “Twilight of the Dogs,” “Remembering Bergamo Alto,” “The Ghost of Walter Benjamin Walks at Midnight,” “Timetable,” “Sundown Blues”

Tuesday, November 6th Poetry and Prayer Reading – Lisa Russ Spaar: “Stairwell Rio Road,” “Lunar Tantra,” “The Anxiety Offices,” “Rendezvous,” “Baptismal,” “Sycamore Tantra,” “Ablution,” “Yule,” “Three Mortifications,” “Fast”

Tuesday, November 13th Poem #4 Due After You: The Response Poem Reading –Lisa Russ Spaar: “’to do that to birds,’” “’Herself to Her a Music,’” “’Permit me voyage, love, into your hands,’” “After John Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed,’” “’Cold. Resolved to be a religious.’” “Keats House” Handouts: Robert Frost, “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same”; Emily Dickinson, “One Sister Have I in Our House”; Hart Crane, “Voyages”; John Donne, “To His Mistress Going to Bed”; Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Windhover”; John Keats, “Answer to a Sonnet by J.H. Reynolds”

Tuesday, November 20th NO CLASS

Tuesday, November 27th Poem #5 Due The Dramatic Monologue Reading – Louise Glück – Read as much of The Wild Iris as you can get through, concentrating on “The Wild Iris,” “Lamium,” “Scilla,” “Violets,” “Witchgrass,” “The Red Poppy,” “Clover,” “Daisies,” “The Silver Lily,” “The Gold Lily,” “The White Lilies”

Tuesday, December 4th Poetry Reading A Garden of Verses Reading – Louise Glück – Finish The Wild Iris