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Advanced Poetry Workshop

ENGL 118.301
instructor(s):
T 1:30-4:30

This workshop will explore not only advanced writing techniques in poetry but also the poem’s evolving relationship to the artifact of the book in the age of the web. Poetry invariably oscillates between a focus on its materials and its capacity to invoke (and challenge) worlds. The best contemporary poetry, regardless of emphasis and commitments, no longer is simply a hodgepodge of recent writing. Students will create a manuscript of at least 20 pages that both demonstrates excellence and internal coherence, but which pushes the notion of book itself into new territory. This is not a class on intermedia. In addition to intensely workshopping our writing, we will also read texts that exemplify the book as horizon, including Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Divya Victor’s Kith, the conceptual anthology I’ll Drown This Book and the even more conceptual Flarf anthology.

fulfills requirements