Class

Translating Life Experience into Poetry

What do we do with what moves us to write a poem? Too frequently does something occur in our lives that seems, to us, profound—the start, the raw material, of a poem!—only for us struggle to communicate its significance when it comes time to write. The problem, as we will discuss in this class, often lies in the discovery of the form, the structure, of our subjective experiences.

This class will examine poetry writing as a practice and a craft, help students generate new writing, and understand how our daily experiences happen to influence it.

This class is intended for students of poetry at all levels, and will require reading craft text(s) and completing generative prompts before each class; the class will fuse the craft essay reading, group discussion, generative prompts, and a descriptive workshop model to address the difficulties inherent to translating everyday experience to what becomes the art of the poem.

After the course, students will leave with a deepened understanding of the craft elements of poetry, a portfolio of new work based on the generative prompt, and an appreciation of how to effectively structure one's experience as material for a poem.