Answer:
Reading Poetry" has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture.
FOR THE EXAMPLE
Syllabus for the Dark Ahead
by: Jehanne Dubrow
Throughout this course,
we’ll study the American
landscape of our yard, coiled line
of the garden hose,
muddy furrows in the grass
awaiting our analysis,
what’s called close reading
of the ground. And somewhere
something will yip in pain
perhaps, a paw caught in a wire,
or else the furred and oily
yowling of desire.
And flickering beyond the fence,
we’ll see the slatted lives
of strangers. The light
above a neighbor’s porch
will be a test of how we tolerate
the half-illumination
of uncertainty, a glow
that’s argument to shadow.
Or if not that, we’ll write an essay
on the stutter of the bulb,
the little glimmering that goes
before the absolute of night.
