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CREW 306: Writing/Reading Poetry

Course Convenor: Dr Helen Farish

Course Aims and Objectives:
This module will build on CREW 205 (Writing Poetry), deepening student engagement with both the writing and the reading process. Both closed and open forms will be explored through a wide-ranging selection of poems (all of which will be found in the set text for the course: The Making of a Poem (ed Boland and Strand). There will be particular emphasis on those forms regularly employed in a twentieth century and a contemporary context.
A portion of each seminar will be spent discussing the set poems for the week. Students will submit their own poems on a fortnightly basis. The dual assessment (a portfolio of students’ own poems plus a close reading of two of the syllabus poems) reflects the course emphasis on the inter-relationship between reading and writing.

Assessment:
1 x portfolio of 9 poems (80%); 1 x 1,500-word close reading of 2 syllabus poems (20%)

Submission Deadlines: Friday Week 2, Term 3, by 12 noon.

Contact: 2 hours per week.

Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the course students will have:

• encountered a variety of both closed and open poetic forms
• learnt about the history of the form as well as discussing its role in a contemporary context
• read and discussed a cross-section of examples from early usages to the present day
• improved their technique as writers of poetry – tightening editorial and redrafting skills, employing prosody to enable the replicating of certain forms
• responded to set texts orally (class discussion) and in writing (submitting poems for workshop)
• developed their close-reading skills

Set Texts:

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, ed Mark Strand & Eavan Boland (Norton, 2000)

Weekly Seminar Programme:

Week 1
The Ballad (‘The Cherry-tree carol’ anonymous, ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ anonymous, ‘Death in Leamington’ John Betjeman, ‘Bagpipe Music’ Louis MacNiece, ‘We Real Cool’ Gwendolyn Brooks
Week 2
The Pastoral (‘Loveliest of Trees’ A E Housman’, ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ James Wright, ‘Midsummer, Tobago’ Derek Walcott, ‘Fog’ Amy Clampitt)

Week 3
The Stanza (‘Easter Wings’ George Herbert, ‘They Flee from Me’ Thomas Wyatt, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ Thomas Hardy, ‘I died for Beauty – but was scarce’ Emily Dickinson)
Week 4
The Pastoral continued (‘The Bear’ Galway Kinnell, ‘Let Evening Come’ Jane Kenyon, ‘Smoke’ Philip Levine, ‘Mock Orange’ Louise Gluck, ‘The Broad Bean Sermon’ Les Murray)
Week 5
The Stanza continued (‘A Quoi Bon Dire’ Charlotte Mew, ‘Not waving but drowning’ Stevie Smith, ‘Those Winter Sundays’ Robert Hayden, ‘Yes’ Muriel Rukeyser)
Week 6
Independent study week
Week 7
Blank Verse (‘from Beachy Head’ Charlotte Smith, ‘Ulysees’ Alfred Tennyson, ‘Rain’ Edward Thomas, ‘Directive’ Robert Frost)
Week 8
Open Forms (‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ T S Eliot, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ Wallace Stevens, ‘Ave Maria’ Frank O’Hara, ‘Diving into the Wreck’ Adrienne Rich)
Week 9
Open Forms (‘The Language of the Brag’ Sharon Olds, ‘The Colonel’ Carolyn Forche, ‘Reading Plato’ Jorie Graham, ‘move’ Lucille Clifton)
Week 10
Conclusions

Back to: CREW 305

Forward to: ENGL 301

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