Department of English

This workshop is intended to help students with prior experience writing poetry develop techniques for generating poems along with the critical tools necessary to revise and complete them. Through in-class exercises, weekly writing assignments, readings of established and emerging poets, and class critique, students will acquire an assortment of resources that will help them develop a more concrete sense of voice, rhythm, prosody, metaphor, and images as well as a deeper understanding of how these things come together to make a successful poem. Weekly assignments will involve using familiar forms like the sonnet, as well as forms originating outside the U.S. such as the pantoum and the ghazal. Students will be asked to produce a final portfolio of poems, keep a writing journal, and participate in a public reading at the end of the term. This class is cross-listed with Africana Studies.