Reading and Writing Poetry: Image and Detail

Course Description

Summary

This poetry workshop focuses on the ways writers deploy language to achieve precision, vividness, sensory richness, singularity, and emotional resonance. We will begin by developing an understanding of the difference between a detail and a visual image, and the distance between the abstract concept of a thing and the sense of the concrete thing itself. We will go on to explore how narrating an experience is different from enacting it on the page, and what we can do to get our readers to successfully enter and inhabit the worlds we create in our poems. We will experiment with adding color and texture to our drafts, as well as with making individual gestures and actions feel cinematic in the ways we render them. Considerable attention will also be devoted to the ways metaphor and metonymy function in poems. We will also explore ekphrastic poetry and visit local art museums for source material for our work. We will turn in a new poem each week and our discussions will be augmented by considering the work of Rick Barot, Elizabeth Bishop, Cynthia Cruz, Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Jorie Graham, Denis Johnson, Mark Levine, Cate Marvin, Matthew Rohrer, Natasha Trethewey, and William Carlos Williams.