Leila A Wilson

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 poems, publishing only a few anonymously in her lifetime. Many know her as a recluse, “the woman in white” who rarely left her room in her family’s home in Amherst, MA, though her poems prove her radicality, edginess, and performativity. Her poems’ imagistic slants, lilting rhythms, and urgent breaks open possibilities that continue to inspire experimentation by poets and artists around the world. In this course we’ll first ground our discussions by learning about Dickinson’s life—her family, friendships, education, cultural influences, and political contexts—and we’ll lean into her fascinations by slowly and closely reading her poems together. Then we’ll spend time with some of her correspondence and see how her letters, along with her poems, enact and embody her queerness, feminism, environmentalism, and social critique. Digitized versions of her original fascicles, as well as some fragments and unbound sets, will allow us to examine her hand script and consider how her poems exist as physical art objects. Thrillingly, her poems invite and resist our knowing; they push back against easy summary and exert their own questions, satire, and sass. As we delve into her work, we’ll also enjoy a diverse group of modern and contemporary poets and artists who have been sparked by Dickinson’s poems, placing them in dialogue with Dickinson in our own expanded room.

In this course we explore how some of the best poets through the centuries have invented, mastered, stretched, challenged, rejected, and reinvented poetic forms. We investigate origins of the haiku, ghazal, sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, blues poem, sestina, ballad, prose poem, concrete poem, and a few other original forms, and we question how modern and contemporary examples both honor and deny the traditions these forms have aroused. Our intentions for this course are not merely to revere formal structures and marvel at how poets have succeeded in meeting verse requirements. More significantly, our aim is to tease open the workings of really good poems to see if we might understand how they mean and perhaps even why they affect us. 'Form is nothing more than a transubstantiation of content,' the poet Charles Wright tells us. If this is true, and if poetic form still holds some of the sweat of its makers, then in looking hard at form we have a chance of uncovering what has mattered-and perhaps still matters-most in human experience.

In this course students will create a singular written project and enrich their understanding of how that project fits into a larger tradition. Through full-class workshops, small-group critiques, individual conferences, and engaged revision, students will deepen the grooves of their writing process and cultivate a practice that is open to feedback and that lets in surprise. Students’ thesis projects can take multiple forms: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, comics, drama, hypertext, performance, hybrid work, or a combination thereof. The course’s readings and inquiries will be driven both by students’ own studies into material significant to their writing and by their productive engagement with their classmates’ work. By the end of the semester, students will have completed a BFAW thesis, consisting of three parts: (1) a creative project; (2) an annotated bibliography; and (3) a reflective essay, which will examine an issue of craft, subject, process, or genre.