Sustaining Wonder: the Art of Narrative Poetry [Carolyne Wright]

Robert Hass has written that human beings “can’t sustain wonder.” Yet that’s the challenge facing the narrative poem: how to sustain wonder beyond the lyric moment of inspiration into the narrative momentum of the story. We’ll create and share new work, exploring strategies to generate longer poems and to keep them going. We’ll consider poetic forms, including prose poems, which lend themselves to narrative voices and rhythms: sequence, collage, narrative, reflection, and epic. The instructor will give an individual conference with each student.