Zawacki, Andrew
T 9:35 AM
Park Hall 0126
Half poetry and poetics seminar and half writing workshop, this course will investigate a different form, mode, or genre every other week. Our topics include the villanelle, sonnet, ghazal, ekphrasis, prose poem, and the tanka. We will study the late Danish poet Inger Christensen’s marvelous project alphabet, to experiment with writing according to the Fibonacci sequence. One session we’ll translate from English to English, while another we’ll work with apostrophe, anaphora, and anacoluthon. Students will draft their own exercises, before critiquing them, either together as a class or in small groups. While featuring an imaginative, artistic component, the course will be a deep dive into the structures and histories of selected English and American—and, to a large degree, international—verse. To that end, we will take apart many exemplary poems, like opening up a watch to figure out how its machinery keeps the time. Consequently, though not a mathematics seminar, students enrolled in this class should be prepared to do a lot of counting—of lines, words, syllables, accents, feet. At close, each student will submit a final portfolio of revised creative exercises, along with a critical essay. Students will attend at least one public poetry reading and file a response.