Writing: Becoming a Poet

  Lecture  Years ago, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published, posthumously, a remarkable book of this title by a great teacher and scholar of poetry, David Kalstone. It was about Elizabeth Bishop’s relationship to the two contemporary poets who mattered the most to her, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. In this class, ten younger contemporary poets, each with a book or three, will explore the work of the poets who have deeply influenced them in spirit and practice. Students will be asked to do the same in a five minute presentation to the class. Those with a concentration in fiction and nonfiction should feel free to discuss predecessors and heroes in their own genre (in poetic terms, of course…), and each of you should work to memorize a hundred lines of poetry—either a longish poem or several shorter ones.  

Guest poets will incude: Saskia Hamilton, Christian Hawkey, Michael Dickman, Matthew Zapruder, Cathy Park Hong, Timothy Donnelly, Monica de la Torre, Rachel Eliza Griffiths.