Good, Bad, Better, Otherwise

"Poetry Workshop: The Good, the Bad, the Better,
and the Otherwise."
This course will function primarily as a poetry
workshop, which is to say we will produce new
writing to share for supportive group critique. In
this way, we will strengthen our critical and
creative faculties, which drive our aesthetic
choices, by discussing how and why we make the
particular texts that we do. In addition, we will
particularly focus on questioning various sets of
criteria (formal, historical, cultural, political)
of how poetry is evaluated in order to refine and
develop our ambitions. The goal, of course, is to
make our writing better. Nevertheless, conceptual
poet Craig Dworkin has usefully speculated what
would happen if our concern "were no longer
whether it could have been done better (the
question of the workshop), but whether it could
conceivably have been done otherwise." While
needn't privileging a conceptualist stance, we can
explore the potentiality of "otherwise." Our
poetry writing will be supported and inspired by a
set of eclectic readings (poetry that's good,
poetry that's bad, poetry that's so bad that it's
good, poetry that is good in some ways but bad in
others, poetry that can do better).