ENGL1923

Poetry has such a fiercely loyal subculture of readers that in 2017, Amanda Gorman was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate. Very Short Poems will introduce you to an adaptive art form that is ideal for our online world; every poem in the syllabus is found online. Featuring work ranging from Amanda Gorman (1998-) to Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), but with a focus on the contemporary as well as the timeless, this seminar will be a literary “lab” class for reading short poems: identifying their effects, understanding how poets achieve those effects, and engaging the ways poets use non-narrative language and space to set a scene, convey an emotion, make an argument, and get us to inhabit a point of view. Class discussions will focus on the poems that most fascinate class members. What bothered or thrilled you? How did the poet make you feel this way with that phrase? Expect to learn why you love some poems and dislike others—a debate all fans of this art form enjoy.

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