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> This course is for anyone curious about poetry and willing to experiment with ways of close reading poems! Some questions we will wrestle with throughout the quarter include: how can we “enter” a poem? What formal techniques do poets employ (or break) and why? What is the relationship between form and content? What are the stakes of poetry today?

> In addition to reading poems, we will engage essays on poetics, including essays and letters from poets such as Aimé Césaire, John Keats, Frederico García Lorca, Marianne Moore, Claudia Rankine, and others. This course also seeks to consider poetry not as a dusty old book, but as something /alive, current, /and/ full of potential/. Students will be required to attend and reflect on at least one poetry reading in the local Seattle literary community.
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> As part of a “W” course, students will be writing and revising two substantial papers. In-class discussions, short response papers, paper proposals, and presentations will provide opportunities with which to develop these two longer papers.
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