This workshop is full. 

We often say that the music of language is one of the essential elements of poetry, and that the habit of writing poems well means understanding not only how musical language works as a counterpoint to the summarizable “meanings” of poetry, but also how it contains within it its own unarticulated meaning.  Of course, poets communicate musically in all kinds of ways, some traditional and some experimental.  Choosing to write in rhyme or meter is, in the end, a musical consideration.  The placement of lines on the page, the use of white space, the silences of line breaks also contain within them musical elements.

This course will explore the many ways poets make use of the sounds and silences of poetry, offering new ways of thinking about this to enhance each student’s own reading and writing.  For this course, students may submit an original draft of a poem of their own composition that they feel deals with language musically (although this is not required for registration).  Part of the course will involve discussion of previously published poems and part will be a workshop of student-submitted poems.   (Although I can’t guarantee that all student-submitted poems will be workshopped, we will do our best.  All submitted poems will receive detailed written comments.)