ENGL469E - The Craft of Literature: Creative Form and Theory; Prose Poem

*This class is undergoing a title change as of 6/26/20. The new title will be Lyric Realities: Person Poem Planet.

But what is a lyric poem?  How does a lyric create its own reality, and how are we to understand its relation to the reality outside the poem?  How has the lyric survived as a verbal art form in a culture saturated with other media forms--radio, television, movies, internet, and all the hybrid and mutating forms they support, let alone stage drama, and other more modern literary genres such as the novel and the short story?  What is the lyric's relation to performative voice, to story-telling, to recorded and live music?  How does the lyric help us understand, as no other art form can, what it means to be a person? How does the lyric help us imagine a collective identity, and a world populated by others, including the non-human?  How does the lyric instantiate an ethics?  How does it create an intimate space in which alternative forms of existence are made possible?  How does it involve us with the experience of time, with conceptions of the divine, with the processes of our own disappearance?  How does the lyric inform our daily lives?  How does it connect us to the past, and focus our attention on the present?  What has the lyric been, what is it now, why do we still need it?  This is a course in which we'll explore such questions while involving ourselves in the shapes and intricacies of poetry's most viable and flexible form, reading the lyric from antiquity to the present moment while eschewing conventions of chronology and enacting our actual experience as readers, in which poems from different periods of time exist simultaneously.  As ours will be a hands-on course, students should be prepared not only to think critically about poems, but also to practice some of the forms of poetry as a way of experiencing and understanding what we're studying.

Prerequisite: Two English courses in literature or creative writing; and have completed a 200-level creative writing workshop in ENGL or permission of ARHU-English Department. Repeatable to 9 credits if content differs.