CRWT 40.14 Black and Latino Poets Creative Writing Course
This course is designed to help you improve your ear and eye for writing poetry, your skill in discussing poetry, and your ability to read poetry as a writer. To that end, the course will alternate between reading and discussing the craft of published poets and workshopping your own thoughtful creations.
Great writers are also great readers. For this reason, we will read with care various styles of accomplished poets. Exploring the ways that certain writers simultaneously negotiate/live in multiple worlds, we will focus on the poems of several critically acclaimed and innovative Black (African, Afro-Caribbean, African American) and Latino (Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Mexican) poets. We will repeatedly ask, how they represent multilayered experiences and complex realities. Yet in moving beyond the tendency to focus on the “politics” and “polemics” in Black and Latino writers’ work, we will pay particular attention to these poets’ craft, to their unique approaches, formal innovations, and skill. How do they put their poems together? What poetic and other literary devices are in use, and how are they suited to the poem in question, to the world(s), in question? What makes the particular poem powerful? What makes it memorable?
Throughout the course, we will alternate between reading and discussing these poets work and workshopping students’ original work.