Department of English

There’s a reason Plato banned poets from his utopian Republic: poetry is wild, uncontainable, ungovernable. The poetic is a feral force acting on and in language to upend fixed ideas and categories, ways of thinking and seeing. In the poetry lab, we’ll perform experiments to help you explore and expand your poetic potential. Students are welcome in the workshop no matter what your experience with the poetic has been. You can even be a prose writer or an artist interested in working with the force of the poetic to improve the rhythm, diction, sound, and arrangement of your writing. In this course, you’ll read and respond to a wide range of poetic works, write every week, be workshopped by your peers, and work on a poetic portfolio that is just as wild as you can be. Cross-listed with Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.