IMF 51705 Poetry: The Contemporary Narrative Poem L W

Instructor

Gillian Parrish

Class Type

Workshop/Literature

Course Description

Through workshops and handouts, this course will provide the opportunity to engage with poetry’s origins as storytelling, by practicing narrative techniques like character development, perspective, conflict, dialogue, and narration through poetic form, voice, line, sound, and figurative language, as well as a space to think of how narrative poetry engages with our past, present, and future. We’ll explore questions such as the scope of contemporary narrative poetry, and the political and ethical ramifications of storytelling. Students will engage the contours of narrativity in contemporary poetry through readings in persona poetry, individual narrative poems, docupoetry, and longer poetic sequences. The last two weeks of the course will focus on workshopping original narrative poems.