Department of English

There’s a reason Plato banned all poets from his utopian Republic: poetry is wild, uncontainable, ungovernable. The poetic is a force that upends not just language but all fixed ideas and categories. In this course we’ll explore your poetic potential. Students are welcome in our language lab no matter what your experience with the poetic has been. You can even be a fiction or creative non-fiction writer--or an artist--interested in working with the force of the poetic and improving the rhythm, diction, sound, and arrangement of your work with language. In this course, you’ll read and respond to a range of poetic works, write every week, be workshopped by your peers, and work on a poetic portfolio that is just as wild as you can be.