WRIT 8400 - Form and Vision in Poetry

What can you not let go of? What can’t let go of you?  In this course, we’ll examine how obsessions can serve as a muse, if we understand obsession as any prolonged and impassioned fascination or devotion.  We will examine how devotion and obsession allow poets to generate and examine material, to wrestle and revel in it, and to organize it into collected work.  In addition to looking at full-length collections of poetry, we’ll read and discuss several chapbooks and think about how the form’s compressed space affects obsessive material.  Readings may include work by Charles Baudelaire, Elizabeth Bishop, John Donne, Camille Dungy, Nick Flynn, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Wayne Koestenbaum, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Claudia Rankine, and others.

Credits: 4

Note: MFA writing/elective