5AAEB054 Creative Writing: Poetry
Credit value: 15
Module convenor: Professor Andrew O'Hagan
Assessment: 5 poems (60%); 1 x 2,000 word essay (30%); writer's journal (10%)
Teaching pattern: One 2-hour seminar weekly
Pre-requisites (if applicable): N/A
Module description:
The purpose of this module is to educate students in the main features of the art form, how to achieve them on the page, and how to recognize and appreciate the literary contexts out of which they emerge. Students will work through their notebooks and workshops to recognize their own poetic impulses and render them with greater precision in what they write. The course will involve teaching by poets as well as critics and directed by Andrew O'Hagan. Students will be encouraged to write poems in the workshops, to be discussed by the group. There will be a mid-tern essay in criticism, picking up on what has been learned, and an end of term examination of five poems written by each student.
Preparatory reading:
The best preparation would be to have a critical look through a couple of the following anthologies:
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Jerome Rothenberg (ed.), Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry, 1914-1945 (New York: Seabury, 1974)
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Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1960)
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Michael Horovitz (ed.), Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969)
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Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville (eds.), A Various Art (London: Paladin, 1984)
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Gillian Allnutt, Fred D’Aguiar, Ken Edwards and Eric Mottram (eds.), The New British Poetry (London: Paladin, 1989)
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Maggie O’Sullivan (ed.), Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North American and the UK (Hastings: Reality Street, 1994)
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Iain Sinclair (ed.), Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology (London: Paladin, 1994)
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Keith Tuma and Nate Dorward (eds.), Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
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John Kinsella and Rod Mengham (eds.), Vanishing Points (Cambridge: Salt, 2004)
Useful websites: