Advanced Poetry Workshop: The Walk of a Poem

As Lyn Hejinian writes, “Language makes tracks.” Poets from Chaucer to Whitman to O’Hara have used walking as a poetic method, thematic subject, narrative device, and pedestrian act. The walk is literal and imaginary, metrical and meandering; it traverses urban grids and bucolic landscapes, junctions of space, time, and lexis. In this workshop we will read the topographies of poems, focusing on lyrical cities from Paris to Harlem, Thoreauvian ambles through woods and field, and other literary wanderings and linguistic itinerancies, in order to examine how language gets made and mirrored in the act of moving through place. Students will also set out on walks through the local landscape as they produce their own work. Students will address crucial questions and challenges focused on the craft of poetry through rigorous readings, in-class writing exercises, critical discussions, collaborations, and the development of a portfolio of writing, including drafts and revisions. By the end of the course, students will have engaged deeply with the practice of poetry, established a writing discipline, honed their skills, generated new work, explored by foot, and extended their sense of the possibilities of a poem. (Approval required; please apply online at http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/enam/resources/forms )