ADULT ED: Making a Poem

Course Description

How do we make a poem? And how does the language of poetry differ from that of prose? In what way does poetic form help us to express a particular experience, memory, thought or feeling? This six-week course will focus on a variety of poetic forms, structures and traditions including the villanelle, sonnet, and pantoum, as well as the elegy, ode, and pastoral. Rather than a set of arbitrary rules and standards, poetic forms allow us to join a tradition, enter a refrain, that has been sung for hundreds, even thousands of years. Each week, we will read and study a selection of poems that inspire us to write in the particular form we are studying. In-class writing prompts and out-of-class writing assignments will provide structure to our developing work. Your poems will be addressed individually with written feedback from the instructor as well as discussed in workshop. Jill Kress Karn is a poet, teacher, and scholar, the author of The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James and Edith Wharton and various essays on literature and consciousness. Her poems have appeared in Salamander, FORMA, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Carolina Quarterly. She has taught literature and creative writing for more than 20 years at the University of Rochester, the Eastman School of Music, Cornell University, Villanova. She is a reader who always keeps a pencil in hand, a dictionary nearby to page through, a journal for scribbling, and a curious mind to accompany her.