Advanced Poetry Workshop: The Public Poem

"It is difficult / to get the news from poems," Williams wrote in 1955, yet American poetry has demonstrated since its inception a fascination with public events and how poetry itself might respond to, even intervene in, those events. This course will explore the genre of the "public" poem, a poem shaped by-registering, responding to, remonstrating against-public phenomena, and one which locates the poetic "self" within a wider social newsscape. On the premise that creative work is socially produced, and that the best training for a writer, therefore, is to read extensively, we will examine an eclectic range of contemporary "public" poetry-Peter Balakian, Quan Barry, Joshua Clover, Martha Collins, Tyehimba Jess, Jill McDonaugh, Gregory Pardlo, Anne Winters-and engage pressing questions in historical and contemporary poetics. We will also, of course, produce, share, and workshop a significant body of our own "public" poetry. What, we will ask, makes a poem of its moment but not momentary? How is "public" poetry different from "political" poetry? Incorporating basic and advanced issues in poetic craft-open form, braided narratives, the ethics of witness-as well as attendance at poetry readings and some critical writing, the course will ultimately help us find and sharpen those techniques necessary to write our keenest, most urgent poetry. We will write, then, not only about public history, but into it.