This is a concentrated workshop in poetry writing for those who wish to improve their craft as poets while broadening their knowledge of poetry. More than half the semester will be devoted to a study of prosody, entailing formal weekly exercises as preparation for later “free-assignments.” Poems by students will be discussed in a workshop format with an emphasis on the process of revision. Students will also be asked to regularly memorize and recite poems.

Because of limited space, students are asked to submit 3-5 poems with a cover letter to Bobbie Kozash in the English Department office in Wright Hall during the pre-registration period.

For contemplation:

“I believe the teacher’s work should be largely negative. He can’t put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those road-blocks removed from its path . . . The teacher can try to weed out what is positively bad, and this should be the aim of the whole college. Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.”
- from Mystery and Manners, by Flannery O’Connor