This course cultivates the tools necessary to understand (or interpret or perform or engage with or comment on or sample or parody or recite or appropriate or imitate or annotate or translate or...) a poem, any poem. No previous experience in poetry reading is required. Instead come willing to think about the way poetry might change the way one sees or structures or experiences the world. Or at the least be willing to see if Emily Dickinson's claim that a poem makes one feel physically as if the top of one's head were taken away has any validity. The class will read widely and with an attention to a variety of poetics forms.