Course Description
Summary
The mask, or persona, is a common construction in creative, focusing on building a personality in a work by manipulation of rhetorical strategies, sound, and perspective. Writers such as William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, Ai, Kevin Young, Patricia Smith, Rita Dove, and many others have relied on their ability to create convincing characters in order to satirize, criticize, entertain, and refashion a community and its politics. In this class, we will study the history of prose poetry and its varying presentations. We will read persona poems across centuries and discover how the form has evolved and in what new ways it has been utilized. There will be short craft essays, persona poem practice, and in-class writing assignments. There is no final exam for this class, but there will be a final project or paper.
