This class will serve as an introduction to reading, interpreting, appreciating, engaging with, and responding to poetry in English. We will consider poems in terms of form (meter, rhyme, etc.), content/theme, and cultural/historical/literary context.

Special attention will be paid to the effects of poetry on the body—we’ll be paying close attention to the ways in which we literally /feel/ and experience poetry—through reading aloud, through empathizing physically with the authors and the narrators or “speakers” of the poems, and through taking note of our kinesthetic experiences while reading poems.

We’ll use as our texts poems in English from about the past 150 years, including (among others) Gerard Manly Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas, Richard Hugo, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert
Pinsky, Jorie Graham, Susan Stewart, Heather McHugh, Joe Wenderoth, Richard Siken, and Dorothea Lasky.

While there may be an occasional lecture, class discussion will serve as our primary mode of engagement. Course activities will likely include: memorization, presentations, and writing poetry in order to internalize poetic forms.

This course fulfills the university's "W" requirement. As such, you'll write three brief (2-3 page) response papers, one of which you'll expand into a longer paper (of 10-12 pages) which will undergo a major revision. You will also write a book review of one book of poetry by a living poet.