The Beginning Poetry Workshop is an elective course introducing students to the art of poetry writing. The course sequentially addresses major commitments of poetry including form/content, sound, line, voice, image, language(s), tradition/convention, experiment, audience, revision, performance, collection, publication, and distribution. Workshop is the heart of the course, animating the practice, discourse, critique, audience, community, and mentorship vital to poets. Every class will also include close reading, discussion of assigned texts, and writing. We will attend public readings, curate and participate in community readings, and welcome poets to our class, when possible. Work can be developed in a range of styles, traditions, and languages. You will leave this class with a collection of workshopped and revised poems, which you will design, self-publish, and distribute in print and/or digital form.

The Beginning Poetry Workshop is a prerequisite for the LAS-E421 Advanced Poetry Workshop in the Spring.

Elective

An introduction to literary study that helps students develop the skills necessary for college-level reading, writing, research and critical thinking. Through exposure to a variety of literary forms and genres, historical periods and critical approaches, students are taught how to read closely, argue effectively and develop a strong writing voice. The course is reading and writing intensive and organized around weekly assignments. There are no waivers for LAS-E101 except for transfer students who have taken an equivalent college course.

Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Transfer Students register into designated section(s).

Major Requirement | BFA

This course focuses first on what has been achieved this century in poetry which engages with new technology at the level of making, i.e., poetry that is born digital. We will assemble an inventory of markers of the new poetics. How do new capacities for color, animation, sound, video, and interactivity, change poetry's identity as literary art? What is the place of the English language, or any language, in digital poetry? Does the born digital indicate the future of poetry at large, an art form already intersecting with digital media at critical levels of production, publication, and distribution? How have power dynamics between author/editor/publisher/reader changed? What is the political/economy of poetry today? Texts will include the Electronic Literature Collection, Volumes 1-3, 2006-2016 (free), Mediawork Pamphlets (MIT Press), and a range of essays by contemporary practitioners and theorists (available on ubuweb, arras.net, eliterature.org, epc.buffalo.edu, etc). Student work will include weekly written observations, one close reading of a single piece of work (or several related works by one or more authors); a research project on one key element of digital poetics; and one digital poem. We will have a class blog in magazine format, and all students must also have an online forum for the posting of work-in-progress.

Elective

The Advanced Poetry Workshop is an intensive project-based poetry workshop for students with previous workshop experience and a portfolio of revised work on which to build. The course centers on workshop: peer critique by students with previous practice in poetry writing, and the shared goal of completing a semester-long publication/performance project. Students are expected to have a strong commitment to active participation in contemporary poetry as readers, writers, curators, performers, and audience. Teaching and learning methodologies include close reading of exemplary texts, experimentation with forms, revision, online/print publication, and performance. Texts will include poetry collections published in 2019 and 2020, as selected by students and instructor. The workshop welcomes work in any language and from any tradition of poetry. To the greatest extent possible, the work should speak for itself. But mediation, translation, contextualization also play a vital role.

Elective