This course is about writing poetry — about falling in love with language, with sound-play and shades of meaning, sentence structures and stress-patterns. This course is about creating a deep agreement between what you say and how you say it.

This course is open to anyone who has ever felt the itch to write poems, to read poems, or to learn more about how poems are written. Along the way, we'll cover an array of basic craft elements (diction, syntax, figurative language, image, voice, sound, meter, etc.) at the same time that we ask larger questions about the writing process and poetry itself — What makes poetry different from prose? What does contemporary poetry look like? How do poems create an effect on the reader? Where do we begin when we sit down to write? Why and how do we revise?

Great poetry has a certain magic; there are some things about poetry that can't be taught. But there are also many things about poetry that can be taught. And that's where we'll begin.