Advanced Poetry Writing: The Poetics of Place

In this advanced poetry writing course, students will be exploring a personally crucial, resonant, haunted/haunting place, or places, perhaps literal, perhaps imaginary.  How have our beloved places been affected by forces both personal and global?  Students will write a poem a week, many in response to assignments.  We will read a few shared texts, engage in something Marina Warner calls “memory mapping,” and generate new work about psychic, geographical, emotional, historical, nostalgic, and/or provocative places, those “flood subject” landscapes by which, as Malcolm Cowley says of childhood, “all others are reckoned and condemned.”  This is a generative workshop, designed to produce new work in a kind of “poetry bootcamp” environment.