Department of English

This course will be a workshop course, where you will write poems that will be discussed in class. The readings and structure of the assignments will aim to sketch in some of the crucial issues in poetics that have persisted from pre-literate poetry to our present moment of literacy and post-literacy. These are the issues have provoked a vast array of solutions, compromises, refusals; learning about and experimenting with some of them should give you the beginning of a detailed map of what poetry has been and can be. We will be concerned with issues of speech, the line, the page, the screen; with inherited forms and the invention of new forms; with various strategies to foreground personal spontaneity as well as strict proceduralisms. Requirements: steady writing and reading. The class will be limited to 15. Please submit a few poems to Bob Perelman (email is fine: perelman@english.upenn.edu).