Department of English

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 twin notions of poetry and book into new territory. This is not a class on intermedia, although intermedia may occur. In addition to intensely workshopping our writing, we will also read texts that exemplify and challenge the book as horizon, including work by Claudia Rankine, Divya Victor, Bhanu Kapil, Susan Briante and others. A focal text will be Jacket2’s feature on Conceptual Writing (plural and global) and other cultural productions.