The Poet's Journal (7PM-9PM EST)

Instructor: Robert Whitehead

This workshop will be meeting online.

If a poem is the expression of an individual mind experiencing a particular moment, reading poetry can feel incredibly intimate—like being let in on a secret world.

In this course, we'll uncover the secret worlds each of us contain. We'll decipher our unique systems of language and map the patterns and images that chart our imagination. Through a series of exercises and prompts, each student will create their own "Poet's Journal"—a daily diary that will help us engage with our own interiority, and mine the secret world in all of us to find the raw material for poems.

To guide our explorations, we will read widely—poetry, essays, hybrid writing, translation, and more. Each class will include ample time for discussion as we work together to try to understand how poetry works. As a final assignment, each student will write their own "Ars Poetica," a type of poetic manifesto that seeks to define their personal relationship to poetry.

Each student will also have the opportunity to workshop 2-3 poems during this course, gaining valuable feedback and insight from a class of engaged readers.