Department of English

Come read, listen, write, and recite poetry! Have you ever wondered: 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. We will begin with the oral origins of poetry and quickly jump forward in time to focus mainly on poetry of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries (both Anglophone and in translation), with a strong emphasis on later works. 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. This course's assignments encourage creative composition in addition to literary and craft-based analysis. Poetry Out Loud will challenge you to speak and to listen, to think creatively and critically, and most of all, to discover how poetry on the page sings out loud.