This course is for anyone curious about poetry and willing to
experiment with ways of reading and writing poems. We will mull over
questions ranging from "What, exactly, is a
sonnet?" to "What does it mean to use the form of a classic
Petrarchan love sonnet to write an anti-love poem lamenting being tied
down to a wife?" and "What choices confront a writer translating an
8th-century classical Chinese poem for a 21st-century Anglophone
audience?"

English 243 will introduce you to a variety of poetic forms and ways
of reading them. We will explore some love poems, twisted love poems,
and poems featuring corpses, as well as poems that have nothing to do
with love or death. You will also practice writing in a few poetic
forms yourself (to learn about poems from the inside out) through
rule-bound poem assignments. Those of you with some knowledge of a
language other than English will have the opportunity to translate a
poem and reflect on that process; everyone will try their hand at
imitating poems or a few lines from a poem.


Our Goals:

Learn to enjoy reading poetry (if you don't already)

Understand some of the most famous, most common, and most interesting
poetic forms, including sonnets, villanelles, calligrammes, and prose poems

Develop a technical vocabulary for reading poetry and experience using
those terms in analyzing poems

Learn about poems from the inside out by writing your own poems as
well as imitations and/or translations of others' poems