POET 20 W — Writing Poetry: Freedom and Form
Summer
Date(s)
Jun 22—Aug 28
10 weeks
Drop By
Jun 25
3 Units
Fees
$795
Limit
17
Closed
You’ve crossed paths with a formal poem—you’ve been baffled by the rules, fearful that you’ll have
to bend your ideas and emotions to fit its requirements. Moving beyond mystique and fear, you will discover in this course how models like the sonnet, villanelle, sestina, ghazal, pantoum, haibun, and others are tools you can use to access your inner world and throw open your poetic options. What writing formal poetry can do best for beginning and practiced writers alike is spark word play and invention, embrace deep concerns and feelings, and build the imagination’s flexibility. Additionally, the weekly writing exercises will reinforce the craft fundamentals needed for writing any successful poem—formal or free verse; you will tune your ear to tone and rhythm, develop finesse with line and stanza, and quicken your images and diction. We will read poems by classic and contemporary masters, including Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Justice, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, and Marilyn Hacker. You will write twelve poems during the quarter, revise and refine your work with workshop feedback from peers and instructor, and also obtain practical advice and guidance on submitting poems for publication.
This is an online course. For more information about the Online Writing Program, visit continuingstudies.stanford.edu/onlinewriting.
Chanda Feldman, Former Stegner Fellow, Stanford
Chanda Feldman’s work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She received a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts grant, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Cave Canem, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the Djerassi Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center. She has been an editor for Chicago Review, Epoch, Glimmer Train, Mantis, and the Humanities Division of McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Feldman received an MFA in creative writing from Cornell.Textbooks for this course:
(Required) Mark Strand (Editor) and Eavan Boland (Editor), The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (ISBN 0393321789)