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C L A S S E S
"Superb Surprise": Reading (and writing alongside) Emily Dickinson (spring, 2010) In this class, we'll learn from a poet whose popular image obscured her experiments in tone, diction, ellipsis, her audacity of metaphor, as well as her ability to rework the worn ballad meters of Protestant hymnals and break them into shards that approach free verse. Is Emily Dickinson American's most radical poet? We'll ponder this point and challenge our own writing practice. We'll study and respond to poems from all phases of Dickinson's most private of careers. We'll also take a look at the late fragments as edited by Marta L. Werner and others to consider how transcription impacts Dickinson's texts. Along the way, we'll take on Dickinson's quasi-poetic letters, including the "Master Letters." End-of-term conference slots with instructor. Texts: Thomas H. Johnson, editor, "Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems" (Little, Brown, 1961); and Thomas H. Johnson, editor, "Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters" (Belknap/Harvard, 1986). Instructor: Deborah Woodard Meets: Saturday, April 10, 2010 - Saturday, May 15, 2010 Richard Hugo House 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM Min: 5 Max: 15 General: $230 Members: $207 This class is full. Please contact the Hugo House Registrar at 206-322-7030 to be placed on a wait list. PAST CLASSES Winter: Generating Poems This winter's Generating Poems features readings in the prose poem, a form that, though it has been around since the 19th century, resists easy definition. Taking Theresa Cha's genre-crossing "Dictee" as our point of departure, we will give ourselves plenty of permission to interpret the prose poem in whatever ways best suit our needs. Spring: Sleeping on the Ceiling: Reading and Writing alongside Elizabeth Bishop In this class we will study and respond to the work of Elizabeth Bishop, traveler, translator and American Modernist poet par excellence. Drawing inspiration from Bishop and her polyglot sources, we will write our own poems in response to various queries. And Then There's Gert: Reading (and Writing Alongside) Gertrude Stein In this class, we'll study Gertrude Stein's creative, constructive syntax, sound sculpture, narrative cubism and connotative collage as a way of understanding and felicitously misunderstanding how to make our own poems poems. Her short, sound-rich writings often come in the form of alternative plays, stories, novels and memoirs. What better opportunity to expand our poetic practice than under the tutelage of this expatriate seer, who remained in her own way an advocate of American English at its most pithy? We will read such weird and often hilarious texts as "Advertisements," "Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters," "Old and Old" and "Forensics." The class is also appropriate for writers of short prose and all admirers of the one and only Ms. Stein. |
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