Write Like a Poet: From Tradition to Innovation

In this poetry workshop, we will spend the first half of the quarter reading and writing in traditional forms and the second half innovating from those forms. When discussing poetry, what do we mean when we talk about craft? What is prosody and why is it important? What are the relationships between form and content? What does a modern sonnet look like? We will consider how a writer might honor a tradition without being confined by it. The culmination of the course will be a project in which the student invents (and writes in) a form of their own. All interested students are welcome beginners and experts alike.