Wednesday, October 8th, 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, August 19th at 10:00AM.
How do we get from the beginning of a poem to the end? What strategies can we employ to streamline or complicate the journey? Traditionally, there have been four modes of poetry--lyric, narrative, meditative, and rhetorical--but contemporary poets often use these modes in combinations, rather than exclusively. The lyric concentrates on emotion, on music and image. Narrative poems move forward on plot. Meditative poems follow the track of the mind: using digression, self-interruption, and associate leaps. Rhetoric is the language of argument, of persuasion. In this seminar-style class we will consider these four main modes of poetry and their possible applications in our own work, reading and discussing poems by Jack Gilbert, Anne Carson, Eavan Boland, and Jorie Graham.