Registration required:
Online, 5 sessions / $325 (members take 10% off)
Sold Out. Email sallie@poetrysociety.org to join a waitlist.
Note: The penultimate session (originally scheduled for Wednesday, April 1) will take place on Monday, March 30.
Robert Hass famously begins his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” with these indelible lines: “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking.” Poetry encompasses much of what it means to be human, from the most wondrous of experiences to the most sorrowful. As a foundational part of being, loss is deeply present as a context and subject for poetry. In this crash course, we’ll read five books that have a contemporary take on the elegy. Some of the books will explore the loss of a specific beloved, while others will explore losses of different scales—histories, attachments, places. With loss as each poet’s starting point, we’ll examine how each poet uses poetry’s resources of form and craft to arrive at poems of complexity, beauty, and poignance.
Class will consist of serious critical discussion of primary texts (below) and supplementary readings; students will also receive generative take-home prompts and recommended reading lists. Class visits from Victoria Chang and Oliver de la Paz will supplement the discussion of their books.
Crash Course seminars require outside reading of assigned texts. After enrolling, students should plan to access (purchase or borrow) the following texts in time to read them ahead of class sessions. Enrolled students should join the first session having read Donald Hall‘s Without.
Reading List:
- Donald Hall, Without [BUY]
- *Victoria Chang, Obit [BUY]
- Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon [BUY]
- *Oliver de la Paz, Requiem for the Orchard [BUY]
- Roxane Beth Johnson, Black Crow Dress [BUY]
*This class session will be supplemented with a visit from the author.
Class modality: Online synchronous (real-time attendance required)
Class size: 8 to 25 students
Required textbooks: Yes
Recorded: Yes
In-class & prompted writing: Yes
Workshopping & feedback: No
Rick Barot’s fifth book of poems, Moving the Bones, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. His previous book, The Galleons was longlisted for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Stanford University. He directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. In 2020, Barot received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Author photo by Rachel McCauley.
A limited number of need-based scholarships are available to cover the enrollment costs of Poetry Society classes. To receive and fill out a scholarship survey, email parker@poetrysociety.org.
