Contemporary Women in Poetry: A Six-Week Close Reading and Poetry Workshop with Emily Leithauser (Zoom)

Each class begins with a close reading/discussion of poems by women who, across a range of styles and traditions, are changing the landscape of contemporary poetry. Exploring the formal and thematic experiments of these influential voices, we will dedicate the second hour to workshopping our poems.

This course meets Wednesdays from 7:30-9:30 p.m. (ET) on Zoom on May 6, 13, 20, 27, June 3 and June 10.

Course Summary:Tracy K. Smith, former Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, wrote recently that “poetry resists the formulaic in its bid to reawaken us to the miracle and the mystery of our lives.” Our task in this course is to (re)awaken ourselves to our own lives through the mysteries of verse. Tracy K. Smith’s delight in epistemological uncertainty, Ada Limón’s awe at the transcendence of our daily lives, Natasha Trethewey’s emphasis on empathy, history, and collective memory, Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s reinvention of the elegy, and A.E. Stallings’s subversive reimagination of traditional forms will guide us along the way. We will also turn to the work of new and emerging poets who are working across a range of traditions, and who raise the question of how to understand poetry through the prism of sex and gender.

Course Outline: This course is divided equally between close reading/elements of craft and workshopping. Beginning with our lyric foremothers—Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks—we will read a wide variety of poems, mainly from the American tradition, but also from other contemporary Anglophone writers. Some of the questions we will explore: How do women writing poetry today grapple with the complexities of our world? How do they engage with gender, sexuality, and identity? How do they reimagine poetic traditions in light of women’s history? How have women, in particular, contributed to lyric?

BIO: Emily Leithauser’s book of poems, The Borrowed World (2016) won the Able Muse Book Prize. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry International, among other venues. Her translations from French have been published in Literary Imagination and Literary Matters. She is the author of scholarship and creative nonfiction in The Kenyon Review, The Hopkins Review, and The Cut. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Morehouse College in Atlanta, where she lives with her husband and two children.