Wednesday, February 19th, 2025, 5:00PM-7:00PM
Meeting will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. General registration will open on Tuesday, December 17th at 10:00AM.
Just as a good documentary film raises questions and provokes thought, so too can a documentary poem. In fact, poet and scholar Jill Magi writes about the ways in which documentary film composition is a useful tool to understand how a poet’s framing of language can make an impact that reverberates long after its reading. In the first half of this class, we will read a few poems and discuss how each poet uses language as if it were a documentary film scene. Based on the models discussed, in the second half of the class, writers will generate their own poems. Come to class with a laptop, project ideas, and with any language from source text (newspapers, legal records, family diaries, images, et cetera) you may wish to include in a poem or poetic sequence.