POETRY, FORM, AND RESISTANCE

POETRY, FORM, AND RESISTANCE
This course is first and foremost a poetry workshop. We will draft new poems and share them in a supportive setting that will prioritize process and possibility over polish. The poems we will study, and the prompts and exercises we will respond to, will focus on form and the ways that poetic forms - inherited, (re)invented, modified, broken - can be deployed as a form of resistance. If the sonnet, as Solmaz Sharif writes, is a form of fascism, then what does it mean for trans writers, writers of color, and women such as Jos Charles, Jericho Brown, and Diane Seuss to write in (and against) the sonnet? How do the poems in poet Fady Joudah's most recent book, [...], make use of silence and erasure in order to condemn silence and erasure? We will consider poems that resist a range of forces: capitalism, amnesia, censorship, occupation, dehumanization. Inspired by Douglas Kearney, we will invent our own new forms, and workshop the forms themselves.