Overview

The short poem has been attractive for centuries for poets and readers alike. In this class we will learn, through our examination of a wide selection of brief poems, how to create a small poem that packs a huge punch. In this class, we will examine the way short poems can serve any purpose - they can be political, ekphrastic, lyric, or love poems. They can be imagistic, didactic, or philosophical. They can be grounded in reality or ignite the reader’s imagination - language driven or meaning driven. The short poem is deceptive because every word needs to be right because each word has more weight. They are often beguiling, magical, fierce, and powerful. They tell a secret and embed themselves into one’s consciousness. They are friends to call upon in times of joy or in times of grief. We will examine poems by Dickinson, Tu Fu, Celan, Hirshfield, Dove, Brown, Alexander, Gregg, Gilbert, Chang, Valentine, Ostriker, Howe, Dougherty, Chen, Merwin, Youn, Hughes, Hayden, Cavafy, Szymborska, Simic, Kaminsky, Smith, Rilke, Larkin, Daye, Laird, Cisneros, Milosz, and others. We will write our own short poems through a series of prompts, and we will workshop one poem a week from each student throughout the class.

Each week, we will briefly (half an hour - 40 minutes) discuss the poems assigned for class and spend the rest of the time workshopping poems from the students. Each student will get feedback on four new poems throughout the course.