Registration required:
Online, 5 sessions / $325
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How do poets today continue to innovate this ancient art? How can learning a bit about traditional poetic forms and modes unlock a world of reading?
This will be a crash course in contemporary poetry through the lens of poetic form—how a handful of exemplary twenty-first-century poets use structures and architectures from the tradition, the shapes of poems arranged on the page, to make arguments about identity, society, and about poetry itself. Introductory lessons and discussions about received forms—such as the sonnet, villanelle, and sestina—as well as attention to meter and rhyme, will reveal new avenues of learning for students wishing to enter the vast and entrancing conversation: the relationship between what a poet says and how a poet says it, beautifully, meaningfully, and memorably.
Reading List:
- Henri Cole, Middle Earth (2004)
- Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard (2006)
- Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Heavenly Questions (2011)
- A. E. Stallings, Like (2018)
- Jericho Brown, The Tradition (2019)
Richie Hofmann is the author of two collections of poems, A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015). He has taught poetry and literature at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Emory.
