English 361PR - Advanced Creative Writing Topics: 'Poetry and/as Response'

Part of poetry's work involves the response to material and spiritual conditions -- those that are shared, and those that may initially seem interior, even private. Too, poetry elicits reactions in the body of its reader or hearer; it wants to move you. In reaching us, the most affecting poems can spur us to write. To respond is to offer something in return: be it complication, corrective, question, outcry, reinvention, intervention, dream. In this course, students will cultivate responsiveness as poetic writing and reading practice, from tracking somatic reactions to their encounters with language, to generating poems from art and archives, to building ethical and receptive critical feedback processes together in the classroom. Along with full collections of poetry and individual poems, assigned texts may include film, performance, visual art, and/or music.

Prereq: ENGL-201.