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MFA Poetry Workshop (496-0-20)

Instructors

Natasha D Trethewey

Meeting Info

University Hall 018 English: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

This course aims to further the development of a student's craft in the writing of poetry with a focus on poems that seek to engage and document public histories, allowing us to place the explorations of our own experiences within a larger historical context. Through reading several collections of poetry and essays on poetry and historical memory, we will explore the intersections and rifts between larger histories (the stuff of cultural or public memory) and smaller, often subjugated or lost histories, and personal histories—as well as the gaps in these histories, the willed forgetting and cultural amnesia often surrounding them. We will discuss and analyze the ways in which some poets have used history in their work as well as the particular formal strategies of their poems, conduct research for writing new poems, define strategies for using information gathered from our research, and produce portfolios of poems that engage public history and/or the intersections between public and personal history. Selected essays on poetry and history—as well as a few collections of poems—will serve as texts for the course.