Conscious Revision [Bill Carty]

Toni Morrison has said that “as a writer, a failure is just information,” and, in a sense, revision is recognition of past failure. In this class, we’ll learn what to do with this information, studying what poems can gain by undergoing a process of “conscious” revision, where the writing process itself becomes part of the work. We’ll look at the poems and strategies used by poets such as Bhanu Kapil, Matthew Rohrer, Terrance Hayes, Wallace Stevens, and Emily Dickinson to refine old work and generate new ideas.