SYLLABUS: POETIC FORMS / FORMING POETRY

WRIT-1040 Matthea Harvey

First Year Studies

“Radial, bilateral, transverse: symmetries that change over a life; radical asymmetries. Sea shells unfurl by Fibonacci. Horn, bark, petal: hydrocarbon chains arrange in every conceivable strut, winch and pylon, ranging over the visible spectrum and beyond into ultraviolet and infrared. Horseshoe crab, butterfly, barnacle, and millipede all belong to the same phylum. Earthworms with seven hearts, ruminants with multiple stomachs, scallops with a line of eyes rimming their shell like party lanterns, animals with two brains, many brains, none.”

—The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers

“Here we have the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention. A prisoner in solitary confinement for life becomes very inventive, and a simple spider may furnish him with much entertainment.”

—from Either / Or by Kierkegaard

This course is part workshop, part an exploration of writing in established, evolving and invented forms. We will use An Exaltation of Forms, edited by Annie Finch and Katherine Varnes (featuring essays on form by contemporary poets) alongside books of poetry by such writers as Baudelaire, Anne Carson, D.A. Powell, Haryette Mullen, W.S. Merwin, and Olena Kalytiak Davis to facilitate and further these discussions. You will direct language through the sieves and sleeves of the haiku, sonnet, prose poem, ghazal, haibun, etc.  Expect to move fluidly between iambic pentameter and the lipogram (in which you are not allowed to use a particular letter of the alphabet in your poem). Expect to complicate your notion of what “a poem in form” is. We will utliize in-class writing exercises and prompts.

BOOK LIST

Required (these books will be on reserve at the library)

A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman

An Exaltation of Forms by Annie Finch and Katherine Varnes

Shattered Sonnets by Olena Kalytiak Davis

A Humument  by Tom Phillips

Vixen by W.S. Merwin

Sleeping with the Dictionary by Haryette Mullen

Skid by Dean Young

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A by A. Van Jordan

The Most of It by Mary Ruefle

Wind in a Box  by Terrence Hayes

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

What It Is by Lynda Barry

Elements of Style by Strunk and White illustrated by Maira Kalman

Photocopied excerpts from:

Selected Odes by Pablo Neruda

I Remember by Joe Braina

Your Time Has Come by Joshua Beckman

Polyverse by Lee Ann Brown

100 Selected Poems by e.e. cummings

Maraca by Victor Hernandez Cruz

Black Dog Songs by Lisa Jarnot

Translating Mo’Um by Cathy Park Hong

Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog  by Paul Monette

Tea by D. A. Powell

Goodbye Mister Easter Island by Jon Woodward

Ravishing Disunities, Real...