The Craft of Poetry

WRITING 432

What's interesting about hybrid poetry is less the fact that it blurs lines between poetry and social sciences or poetry and photography or poetry and nonfiction/fiction, but instead the ways in which each individual field as a unit can add a fundamental element to the larger poetic work. Can we imagine Claudia Rankine's Citizen without the image of Caroline Wozniacki parodying Serena Williams' body? How do the pencil drawings in Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony add to both the visual and emotional texture of the poetic landscape? And what do we make of poetic works grounded in, for example, the language of history? How does the historical record complicate poetry as art? We will respond to these questions and more by reading texts such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee and Mark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary. Using the semester texts as models, students will write poems and engage in discussion. PREREQS: Undergraduate students must have taken Writing 322 Poetry 2 to enroll. This course counts toward the Creative Writing Concentration.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; WR P