Writing: The Practice of Poetry

Seminar – Based on an unauthorized Anthology which I’ve been shaping for fifteen years (working title is Even More Trouble in Mind), we’ll be looking at an array of contemporary American poems through the lens of thirteen ways of inventing a Voice on the page. Each of these chapters is built around a particular assignment including: Leaping Poetry (Bly), The Numinous (Kunitz), The Duende (Lorca). We’ll be studying the construction of the line, the choreography of the voice on the page, the art of Violent Concision, the shaping of an American Sonnet, The Manifesto, Self-Portraits, Triggering Poems, and, finally, we’ll move toward a definition of a new School called “Feral Poetry” —(which does not exist). Until we construct it.

You’ll respond to each of the thirteen assignments. And these we’ll distribute and read aloud. And each of these assignments will be tailored to provoke a “subversive” exercise, that is to say— every rule may be bent unto broken.

This is a seminar for first-year poets only. The World According to Us. By way of introducing your work to your peers, please bring a poem to the first class which may be construed as either a Self-Portrait or an Ars Poetica.