Mark Wunderlich’s course will provide you with practical tools for starting poems, building on them, revising them and pushing them to their best possible conclusions. Using letters, directions, prayers, lists, litanies, etc. as a starting point, you will be guided through the entire development process for creating your own personal poems.

In this course, students will complete a series of guided assignments based on different rhetorical forms—letters, directions, prayers, lists, litanies, etc.— and produce multiple drafts of new poems which students will then revise. The intended goal of this course is to provide you with practical tools for starting poems, building on them, revising them and pushing them to their best possible conclusions. This course is appropriate for beginners, though some knowledge of the fundamentals of prosody will be useful.

In addition to your own work, we will read work of contemporary (and not so contemporary) poets whose poems model some of the strategies you will practice during our weeks together. You will be asked to respond to the poems in our group conversations, to each other, and to me.