CREW 205: Poetry, Genre and Practice

Week

Workshop

Discussion Material

1

What is Poetry? Some definitions. We will look at Ezra Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts’ and Langston Hughes’s ‘How to be a Bad Writer’. We will examine what we take poetry to mean. We will discuss the idea of poetry as anything BUT a means of self-expression

Ezra Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts’
Langston Hughes, ‘How to be a Bad Writer’

2

Poems as Things Made from Words: A poem is a made thing (poiein: to make). Words often come before ideas or meanings. Poetry is ‘the best words in the best order’. This seminar also looks at levels of diction, the materiality of language and etymologies as springboards. It also begins to look at rhyme and its uses.

Henry Reed, ‘Naming of Parts’
Louis MacNiece, ‘Snow’
Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’
Paul Muldoon, ‘Quoof’

3

The Rhythm Thing: This week we look at meter and ‘musicality’, how a poem generates or confounds rhythmic expectations, and ask why poems are sometimes organised in regular, or irregular, metrical patterns. We’ll consider the pros and cons of ‘memorizability’

It is recommended that you take a look at the Hollander and Boland/Strand books mentioned above before this seminar.
Tony Harrison, ‘Timer’
Tess Gallagher, ‘Black Silk’

4

Time and the Poem: Poetry and Photography: This seminar looks at ekphrasis – poems ‘about’ pictures, or those which have some descriptive, pictorial dimension – especially, in our time, those which engage directly with photography. Just within this narrowly defined sub-genre, great variation and invention can still be encountered. We will look at several poems which engage with the still image in a number of ways

Ted Hughes, ‘Six Young Men’
Douglas Dunn, ‘Portrait Photograph, 1915’
Sharon Olds, ‘I Go Back to May 1937’
Neil Rollinson, ‘Long Exposure’
Margaret Atwood, ‘This is a Photograph of Me’

5

The Secret Life of a Poem: Where do poems really come from? We look at an individual poem by the tutor in detail – this is a chance to speculate on possible precursors, the genesis of poetry and absorption of influences. It is also a chance to look at the importance of drafting. It seeks to give a little first-hand insight into the process, from first notes to finished poem

Paul Farley, ‘Treacle’

6

Independent Study Week – No Workshop

7

Finding Form: Why has poetry, across the ages, taken on the formal shapes it has? What are the reasons for these organisations of lines and stanzas? What are they doing? Using one verse form – the sonnet – as a focus, this seminar explores deeper engagements between verse form and reader than the standard contract: ‘I am reading a traditional form, with rules’.

Robert Frost, ‘The Silken Tent’
Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Prayer’
W.H. Auden, ‘Musee de Beaux Arts’

8

Holding a Line: This seminar explores lineation. How line breaks affect sound and sense, the white space and the dark mark. It considers catalogues and lists as poetic forms. It then examines poems as typographical spaces inhabiting a page, what James Fenton has called ‘writing for the eye’.

William Carlos Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’
e.e.cummings, ‘Buffalo Bill’
Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Il Pleut’
Christopher Smart, from ‘Jubilate Agno’
Don Paterson, ‘The Scale of Intensity’

9

No Direction Home:  This seminar looks at the idea of ‘home’ in poetry. Ideas of home as being in the past, or wherever we are now, or ahead of us at some future destination. We will look at memory and loss and scale as things the short lyric poem can negotiate; and the short lyric itself as a suspension of time, as a space we enter (or return to) when we read the poem.

Louise Glück, ‘Nostos’
Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Epic’

10

Open Mic: Over to you. Students select one poem they’ve written this term to read to the assembled group. We’ll be looking at how readings and publication ‘complete’ the act of writing a poem, bring a work into the ken of the listener and reader.