ENG 309 - Advanced Poetry Workshop

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR (students beginning prior to Fall 2024): Meets general academic requirement AR.
Prerequisite(s): ENG 221 - Introduction to Poetry Writing or ENG 245, 246 Poetry & the Imaginative Process
This course is an advanced workshop in poetry, wherein you will regularly write poems, experiment with form and content, engage with contemporary poetry, and explore your own poetics and aesthetics. You will have the freedom to write what you care about and we will be discussing student work every class. Though it takes place under fluorescent light in a building with office decor, the workshop is a facsimile of gatherings (artist salons) that have sprung up through history in cafés, homes, parks, churches, and bars. We share their purpose: to be inspired and to inspire fellow writers, to rattle the roof with our voices, to pause, to truly contemplate all that seems to be bypassed in our manufacturing/manufactured superhighway culture, including the beautiful, the strange, the ordinary, the haunting. The difference—and it is a crucial one—is that our group is defined by no school of thought, movement, clique, or shared aesthetic. We come together to not only encourage one another, but to challenge, to demand—as all true loves do—commitment and passion, utter engagement of mind and not-mind. Our goal in this course is to fall in love—with words, with the world, with nuance, with song, with the glistening shards of our lives. Satisfies Departmental Poetry, Social Justice, and BIPOC requirements.