or, Writing in Typhon's Cave
Professor: Dan Beachy-Quick
Description:
Our class this semester has three separate hopes and so three separate concerns. Those are as follows: 1) to introduce us---or re-introduce us---to basic (and not so basic) elements of prosody, including metrics and received form; 2) a conversation about Form at a more conceptual level, which will require us to read a number of essays in/on/of Poetics, ranging from Romanticism to Projective Verse; 3) to write a series of imitations of other poets' poems.
Of course, these three concerns are deeply inter-related. Our main effort will be to draw these three concerns into ever-greater relation with one another by balancing a praxis or techne with a more theoretical poesis, investing our thinking about poetry with the experience of writing in form, investing our writing in form with the deeper conceptual concerns discovered in our reading and discussion. To deepen this concern that balances a writing-work with a reading-work---this confounding work, this confusing work, in the most literal sense---we will also read a small selection of poem from many of the poets whose poetics we'll be reading, and attempt to write imitations of those poems. The immediate hope in such an endeavor is widen the array of our sense of poetic possibility---of syntax, of rhythm, of music, of image, of line, and so on. More, our efforts at imitation---the mostly obviously Typhonic aspect of our semester's work---will allow us to gain a different insight into the poetics we've read.
Braiding together these three strands of work will, I hope, offer each of us something remarkable--it will lend to our practice of writing the simultaneous practice of thinking to such a degree that they will be one and the same. It is only out of such radical combinations that a genuine poetic can develop, a genuine form and technique, a unified form and content. For a poetic without a poem is a head that has forgotten it has a body, and a poem without a deeper formal inquiry a body with no head. It is an easy thing to make half a form; it is on the order of art to make the halves a whole.