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“But I go on/with the cargo cult, blindly feeling the snow/come down, learning to flower by tightening.” So ends Jack Gilbert’s poem about walking through the parks of Copenhagen, leaving us with a Zen koan of a paradox. How do you learn to flower by tightening? Isn’t that really uncomfortable, and totally unlike the luxurious effluence of a blooming flower? Contemplating this at first is more brain-breaking than enlightening, but in this self-cancelling pronouncement, Gilbert sums up an important aspect of poetic craft: turning inwards to burst out.

In this class we will turn inward, and inspect our current strengths and weaknesses as poets and as readers. We will focus primarily on interpreting and practicing poetic techniques that are not our strong suits – form, meter, tone, image, voice, anything we’re uncomfortable with – so as to better equip ourselves with myriad poetic approaches and a wider appreciation of their usage. With a particular focus on the relationship of form to content and poetical-rhetorical strategies, this class will aim at developing as many poetic muscles as we can discover and discuss in eight weeks.