Writing Improvisational Verse and Prose Poetry

This course focuses on the writing of improvisational verse and prose poems, certainly the most popular forms of poetry today both in America and around the world. The course will explore a wide variety of approaches to non-metrical verse and examine how poetry sounds when it appears in prose form. Using a workshop format, students will generate, share, and receive feedback on their poetic experiments, with an emphasis on developing a more finely tuned ear for cadence and phrasing. Robert Frost famously wrote that writing what he called “free verse” was like “playing tennis with the net down.” This course aims to demonstrate why Frost was wrong.