Flowers, gardens, and floral landscapes have long been a source of poetic inspiration. “O, my Luve’s like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June,” wrote Robert Burns in 1794. Two hundred years earlier, Sir Edmund Spenser gave us the inspiration for “roses are red, violets are blue.” Today, plants and gardens provide rich metaphor, image, and form for poetry. In this class we’ll explore the lush and literary pathways of the poetic and floral. We’ll dedicate half of our time to reading and discussing poems of and about plants, drawing on the long history of flowers and gardens and leafy landscapes in poetry as well as contemporary work, and we’ll spend the rest of our time on poetry-writing exercises and workshopping of student poems. One class will be held in the field on a botanical trip. This class is open to all skill levels of poets, gardeners, and those who simply want to stop to smell (and write about) the roses.

Registration for this course is closed.