English 609: Poetry Writing

What's due today:

• Group-led discussions of Smith/Trethewey books
• Billy Collins, "Workshop"
• Discussion: Procedural poems
• Activities:
  • Mad Libs Poetry (here's my example)
  • Half poem (from a poem by Ralph Angel)
  • 20 Poetry Projects
• Workshopping

What's due next class:

For next week: Rhyming forms and the Ghazal

• More in the way of explanation
• Ghazal net (online site of ghazals in English)
• Another site with ghazals; more explanations
• Sonic level: kinds of rhyme
• Typographical level: Stanzas, strophes, verse paragraphs

Reading for next week (these poems are either ghazals or they use rhyme in ways that disguise it or transform it)

• Hiding the Rhyme (My exercise)
• Online: Auden, Musee des beaux arts (again) and Shield of Achilles; Hecht, More Light (audio) and text; Kumin, "Noted in the NY Times"; Edward Taylor, Upon a spider catching a fly; Longellow, Lost Youth; Frost, To Earthward; Marianne Moore, Feed Me Also, River God; Millay, Rendezvous; Hughes, Harlem; Bishop The Shampoo and a nice discussion of it;Swenson, The Wave and the Dune Wilbur, The Beautiful Changes; Herbert, Man and The Collar; Owen, Futility; Wilbur, Advice to a prophet (again) and Cottage Street 1953; Yeats, Cuchulain Comforted; Hopkins, Bugler's First Communion, To What Serves Mortal Beauty; Yeats "Wild Swans at Coole"; Herbert, Baptism, Hardy, At Castle Boterel; Donne, Valediction: of Weeping; Bogan, Medusa
• Rhymed form: ghazals (with an archive of Urdu Ghazals)
• Online: Ali, Even the Rain; Clark, Riverside Ghazal; Heather McHugh Ghazal (kind of loose); Cole, Ghazal of What hurt

Homework: Write a procedural or "Found" poem (or choose your own topic)