Registration required:
Online, 5 sessions / $325 (members take 10% off)
Register
“What a service to poetry it might be . . . to write a long poem, a story poem, with a female narrator/hero. . . . There might be recovered some sense of what mind was like before Homer, before the world went haywire & women were denied participation in the design and making of it. Perhaps someone might discover that original mind inside herself now, in these times. Any one might.”
—Alice Notley, “Homer's Art” (1988)
In this course, we will explore how modern and contemporary poets have questioned, recast, and reclaimed the epic, challenging the male-dominated and patriarchal narrative structures that have come to be synonymous with this ancient form. How do these poems reinvigorate not only the subject position of epic poetry—opening up to POC, women, and trans perspectives—but its very technique and material in order to “look past Milton’s bogey” (Woolf) or perhaps even talk back to it? Enrolled students will read five books as well as selected abridged supplementary material. In-class writing will be a weekly part of our exploration of the texts. Students will be given a list of recommended further reading to continue their journey.
Crash Course seminars require outside reading of assigned texts. After enrolling, students should plan to access (purchase or borrow) the following texts for reading ahead of class sessions. Students should come to the first class having read the poem “Annie Allen” by Gwendolyn Brooks and the short introduction (pp. 11-12) to erica kaufman's Instant Classic.
Reading List:
- Session 1: “Annie Allen,” from Selected Poems, Gwendolyn Brooks [BUY]; from Instant Classic, erica kaufman [BUY] [Digital]
- Session 2: The Descent of Alette, Alice Notley [BUY]
- Session 3: Midwinter Day, Bernadette Mayer [BUY]
- Session 4: Perverts, Kay Gabriel [BUY]
- Session 5: Voyage of the Sable Venus, Robin Coste Lewis [BUY] [Digital]
Class modality: Online synchronous (real-time attendance required)
Class size: 8 to 25 students
Required outside reading: Yes
Recorded: Yes
In-class & prompted writing: Yes
Workshopping & feedback: No
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collections Fort Not (2017) and Tantrums in Air (2025), both published by The Song Cave. Skillings’ recent poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Granta, FOLDER, The Yale Review, and the New York Review of Books.
Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Skillings currently teaches creative writing at NYU and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn. Author photo: Sarah Wagner Miller.
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.
