04:30 PM to 07:10 PM M
Online
Section Information for Fall 2020
Ekphrastic poems respond in language to artwork composed in another medium—usually but not exclusively, visual art. In this course we’ll read and reread a wide variety of ekphrastic texts—starting with some well-known earlier examples like Blake’s 18th c. composite engraving “The Sick Rose” and Wang Wei’s 8th c. “Mountains and Rivers.” Most of our time, however, will be spent with 20th and 21st century poets and poetry. Since this is a Writing After Reading course, we’ll be taking the poems we read as models and challenges as we write our own ekphrastic poems from prompts we generate ourselves. Everyone will choose their own instigating art—whether that’s body or cave art, high renaissance landscapes or cut-paper portraits, monumental land art or Persian miniatures, photos of corpses or ghosts or blank planes of ocean, performances or conceptual silence. Half our classtime will be spent workshopping your poems.
I hope that our own reading and looking, surprised by and prismed through writing prompts and challenges, will yield us new poems, like and unlike our usual ones, and like and unlike the poems we read. Obviously, however, the selected poems are only starting places for your reading. I’m betting that each of you will develop a taste for one or more of the poets we sample and that you will then go on to read those more deeply. As in any 608 course, please be willing to look and to see differently, to try on new ways of making poems and new approaches to what a poem is, does, and means to be. The idea is to experiment with new attitudes and strategies, to break habitual patterns of beginning and ending, to find alternative rhetorical structures, tones, ways of making lines that sing or that refuse to sing. With that experimental attitude we will be focusing more on drafting new poems and less on polishing for workshop review. Our classes will reflect that generative focus: rather than workshop a few poems at length each week, we will briefly workshop several.
You should expect to read about a book a week, to experience lots of art and to write a poem about every other week; the exact frequency depends on the number of students enrolled
ENGH 608 DL6 is a distance education section that meets synchronously. Students should expect to be online during the days and times scheduled.
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Credits: 3
Enrollment limited to students with a class of Advanced to Candidacy, Graduate, Junior Plus, Non-Degree or Senior Plus.
Enrollment is limited to Graduate, Non-Degree or Undergraduate level students.
Students in a Non-Degree Undergraduate degree may not enroll.
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