We will begin this eight-week course reading and engaging with poems in traditional forms, such as sonnets, ghazals, sestinas, pantoums, and villanelles. To facilitate our exploration, we will develop or refresh our poetic vocabularies through discussions of such things as poetic feet and meter. We will also consider how traditional forms are being reinvigorated and/or reimagined in contemporary contexts; for example, we will look at sonnets in the work of Karen Volkman and K. Silem Mohammad, who “collaborates” with William Shakespeare in The Sonnagrams. The second half of the course will examine new forms, including those invented for various projects, such as the form used in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, along with John Cage’s mesostics and Jenny Boully and Jennifer Martenson’s footnotes. In addition, participants will have the opportunity to try out forms in their own writing and to workshop their poems as desired.