The Virginia G. Piper
Center for Creative Writing

In this course, students are invited to develop an acute awareness of their senses in order to write more visceral, striking poems. We will discuss examples, contemporary and ancient, to initiate a practice that draws on figurative language, synesthesia, and the disavowed parts of self to plunge beneath the bland methods that tend to preempt or deplete many poems of our era. Our watchwords will be conflict, obstacle, desire, and contradiction that we may hone a fuller relationship with language that eschews the topical, the merely competent, and which instead dislodges a poem more knowing, uncanny, and authentic to the poet. You will be asked to consider your dreams, fears, wishes, conflicts, desires, and paradoxes. Therein lie the worlds that only unforgettable art grasps.