This is an online workshop that takes place via Zoom

This workshop is full. Please sign up on the waiting list here so you receive priority registration the next time this class is offered.

How to Read a Poem

This course begins with the assertion that great poems are not written in code, nor are they devised as puzzles for students to solve. Rather, great poems exist to communicate, often urgently, about the issues, beliefs, and feelings that are most important to all of us.

Learning to read poems well, however, often takes practice and knowledge about how language operates under pressure, about how imagery communicates ideas, and, most of all, about how the music of language can serve as a vessel for thought and meaning. What does it mean to say a poem enacts thought? What exactly is free verse? Why do we say all poetry is a formal art? How has the relationship between the poet and the reader evolved over time? In this course, Kevin Prufer will offer close readings of poems by, among others, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, and T. S. Eliot, while at the same time offering participants tools for reading other poems well and thinking about poetry.