***SOLD OUT*** 

Please email patri@email.arizona.edu to be put on the waitlist. 

Wednesdays: January 29 & February 5, 19 and 26 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

(No class Feb. 12)

Meetings will be in the Poetry Center Alumni Room 205. 

Registration for this class opens December 6, 2019.

In 4 two-hour sessions, we will read and discuss a range of poems from diverse sources, contemporary and historical, in which the poem directly addresses someone or something named or unnamed––self or other, dead or living, antagonist or beloved. Poems offered for close reading will include Whitman, Dickinson, Keats, Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, and Frank Bidart, among others. Participants will be invited to write and share new poems sparked by our reading and discussion. We'll consider the music and energy of speech––its actual physical intensity––and some of the ways it can open the poem to expose what lies under the surface of ordinary life. We'll explore how the poet's concept of a reader influences word-choice and tone and whether the poem's language is elevated or colloquial, compressed or expansive.