ENGL 2017: Introduction to Poetry

In this course, students enter as writers, as poets, as those engaged in the lineage of the practice. Language, sound, craft: this is their new materiality. Together, the class will “gesture toward home” per Jericho Brown by exploring poetry that confronts convention, reconsiders form, and engages with the sensory realm, and in the process, discover the ways in which our own poetry “happens when nothing else can” per Charles Bukowski. In order to ground the course, this section of Intro to Creative Writing: Poetry will engage with the work of contemporary queer and trans* poets engaged in developing and practicing their own form of ecopoetics (or, poetry focused on the environment), including CA Conrad, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Mx. Yaffa, and KB Brookins, among others. Ultimately, this course will encourage students to not only call themselves “poets,” but to confidently approach reading and writing with new and renewed strengths and skills.