The class is called The Poetics of Excess. By "excess" I have in mind Keats' notion that poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and we should load all our rifts with ore. That said, we'll look at musicality in poetry beyond the traditional formal dimension toward developing an ear for sonic texture, word bindings, verbal virtuosity, innovative syntax, and disproportion in general rather than balance. Lots of mermaids, griffins and flying snakes, as Horace would have it. Craft issues will (most likely) include the multivocal, the "wordrich" (Hopkins) of pattern in assonance, consonance and the like, fragment, syntax, tone, the image, metaphor and figure. We'll cover (at least) Stevens, the apocalyptic, lesser known Roethke, Berryman, Graham, Hopkins, Eliot, Robert Hayden and more.

Each class period will be devoted to several extended, extremely close readings. Strongly recommended additional reading will be suggested to add breadth to the students’ knowledge of each author, but depth of analysis with a writer’s muscles in mind will be the goal of our limited class time.

Written assignments will include 2-3 creative responses (poems) with revisions, and a brief critical paper (5-10 pages) due at the end of the term. In addition, we may engage in shorter journal-like prose responses to the in-class readings, to be done prior to our meetings.

Books are to be purchased from Open Books. Standard collected works by each major writer will be fine in most cases, and so library copies will suffice also (though as a practicing poet, you probably should own say, a collected Hopkins or Stevens, etc.). Individual poems not included in collected volumes but still of interest will be provided in the form of handouts from the professor.