Registration required:
Online, 5 sessions / $325 (members take 10% off)
Register
“Whether we attend to the fact or not, poetry has deep roots in song. Beyond their meanings, words are sounds, notes, if you will.”
—Tim Seibles, “Croon: A Brief on Line”
A poem is an event on the page. A moment in time. How does a poem use its time with us to create a feeling? In this course, we’ll explore books that move, employing sound, rhythm, echo, pulse, and pacing to activate and engage the reader and communicate beyond language. Through reading, conversation, and generative exercises, we’ll train our ears in the workings of the page and discover how poems dance readers through their sonic landscapes.
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 Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville.
Reading List:
- Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville [BUY]
- John Murillo, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry [BUY]
- Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion [BUY]
- Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary [BUY]
- Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin [BUY]
Class modality: Online synchronous (real-time attendance encouraged)
Class size: 8 to 25 students
Required textbooks: Yes
Recorded: Yes
In-class & prompted writing: Yes
Workshopping & feedback: No
Camille Rankine is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. Her first book of poetry, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her chapbook, Slow Dance with Trip Wire, was selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. She is the recipient of a Discovery Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Hawthornden Foundation, and the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her poetry has appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, A Public Space, Tin House, and elsewhere. She co-chairs the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council, and is an assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Author photo by Matthew Thompson.
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.
