Zawacki, Andrew
R 9:35 AM
Park Hall 0126
(Open to Creative Writing Program doctoral students only.) 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, and the tanka. We will also make a mini-unit out of the prose poem (in part to accommodate any prose writers who, despite the arc of the whole, might wish to take the course) and will study, as well, the late Danish poet Inger Christensen’s marvelous project alphabet, to experiment with writing according to the Fibonacci sequence. Students will draft their own exercises, before critiquing them. 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.