Wonder, Awe, and Thinking with David Baker (via Zoom)
In this master-class we’ll examine the long continuum of lyric stances ranging from wonder and awe to assertion and deduction. We’ll consider a variety of trajectories for these lyric postures, too, asking how poems make their cases or represent their states of being. Is Roethke accurate when he proposes, “We think by feeling. What is there to know?” What kind of relationship is he proposing? I’ll refer to specific poems—old and new, from a diversity of voices—as well as theories of rhetoric, aesthetics, and cognition, all the while keeping our focus on the hands-on craft of a lyric poem. There’ll be plenty to read and talk about and a reading list as well as lots of prompts to take away for your work to come.
NB: This class will be taught on Zoom and will be capped at 15 students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email [email protected] with any questions.
David Baker is a poet, educator, editor, and literary critic. He was born in 1954 in Bangor, Maine, grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, and since 1983 has lived in central Ohio. He received his B.S.E. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Central Missouri and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah, where he also served from 1980-83 as Editor and Poetry Editor of Quarterly West. Since 1984 Baker has taught at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, where he is currently a teaching Emeritus Professor of English. Baker also serves frequently on the faculty of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College and at writers’ workshops around the country. After serving as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review for more than twenty-five years, he currently curates the annual “Nature’s Nature” feature for the magazine.
