English 56/170
BEGINNING and
ADVANCED
POETRY WORKSHOP
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1-2:15 at Mills Hall 322

Juliana Spahr
Mills Hall 315
office hours: Tuesdays 10-11:30 am

syllabus

details

 

 

Emily Dickinson claims that a good poem makes one feel physically as if the top of one's head were taken away. In this class we'll read some good ones and write some of our own and see if we've still got our heads on straight at the end of the class. Instead of a workshop that teaches you various traditional poetry forms, this course will focus around key words: identity, politics, love, the everyday, language, and nature. For each word/section, we will first read some example poems and then we will write and workshop work by those in the class. No previous experience in poetry reading or writing is required. The class is designed to be useful to both those who write poetry all the time and to those who have yet to write a poem. The only requirement is to be willing to explore new possibilities for writing. And that you come willing to think about the way poetry might change the way one sees or structures or experiences the world, willing to test out Dickinson's exploding head theory.