English 273: Introduction to Literature: Creative Writing: Poetry and Place
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This course is motivated by poetics of place. In the following months, we will explore the ways different poets talk about place in order to interrogate notions of “home.” With undeniable intensities, the developments in technology and communication practices have altered the ways bodies, objects, and ideas move. As a result, our relationships to place have radically transformed. So throughout the semester, you will read, create, and perform poetic texts that document how “home” has behaved (or misbehaved) in people’s lives. Being attentive to the proliferations of place-based relationships in poetry, we will address issues of memory, belonging, and rupture. A central tension, for example, emerges between our roots and routes. Or, in local terms, on-island and off-island. If we leave home, can we ever really return? Do we really leave? And if departure is at best incomplete, how do our relationships to “home” evolve? How do writers map the world around them? How can place both contain and release poetic imagination?
Ultimately, this course is a love letter to “home.”
COURSE GOALS
- To understand and engage your potential as a poet
- To refine the ways you read, reflect on, and respond to poetic texts
- To understand how various poetics forms and devices illuminate and challenge standard expectations of language
- To actively learn and practice a range of poetic forms in order to develop a dynamic approach to “home”
- To produce a substantial collection of poems that explore notions of “home”