This course 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. Finally, we will reflect on some of the aesthetic and ethical possibilities that poetry as a genre may offer.