Department of English

How is the spoken word different from the written? How do we find music in language or even make it ourselves? This course will explore the performative and sonic aspects of writing and reading poetry—its orality, sounds, and rhythms—from antiquity to the 21st century. This trajectory will take us from traditional genres and forms such as pastoral, elegy, ode, and ballad, through to more recent work such as beat, slam, and sound poetry. In addition to poetry, we will also read theoretical and critical texts in order to better understand genres, forms and their historical transformation. This course is being offered as a CWiC Critical Speaking Seminar. Class discussions and assignments will develop both analytic and creative skills, and the majority of the assessment tasks will be in-class presentations.