INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
Summer 2012
The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University
Instructor: Clay Cogswell
ccogswe2@jhu.ed
Course: AS.220.201, section 21
Time: M/Tu/Th 10:00 – 12:30
July 2nd through August 2nd
Location: Hodson 211
Course Description
Students will write one poem a week for five weeks. These will be revised and submitted
as a final portfolio. Each class meeting will include a poetry workshop and close readings
of a handful of poems from our text (see Calendar). Students will initiate discussion of
these poems from the text with brief, informal presentations.
Attendance, Participation, Late Work
Attendance and participation are essential. All students will be expected to be present and
engaged for all fifteen class meetings. Three absences will result in failure of the course.
No late work will be accepted.
Text
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th Ed., edited by Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy.
Grading
Attendance & Participation
Engagement in Workshop
Informal Presentation & Journal
Final Portfolio
25%
20%
15%
40%
Tentative Calendar
Week 1: The Aubade
Reading: Larkin: Aubade (1658); Kenney: Aubade (1954), W.C. Williams Dawn,
Lorca’s The Dawn. Also Zagajewski’s Late Feast
Also: Robert Frost: Mending Wall (1227), After Apple-Picking (1231), The
Wood-Pile (1232), The Oven Bird (1233), The Most of It (1243)
Assignment: This will be due on July 2nd, our first class. Rise before dawn and find a
place with a good view. Take notes. Write a poem that is founded on vivid, specific,
unexpected imagery and metaphor.
Week 2: The Elegy
Reading: Ben Jonson: On My First Son (323); Elizabeth Bishop: One Art (1527);
Housman: To an Athlete Dying Young (1174); Robert Lowell: My Last Afternoon with
Uncle Devereux Winslow (1597); Anthony Hecht: The Book of Yolek (1672); Gunn: My
Sad Captains (1771)
Also: Wallace Stevens: The Snow Man (1256), Anecdote of the Jar (1260),
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1260), Of Mere Being (1268)
Assignment: Write an elegy for a person whom you, or the speaker, have lost. If you
prefer, you can elegize a thing or quality—such as good manners, manual typewriters, a
demolished house.
Week 3: Ekphrasis
Reading: Williams: Pictures from Breughel (1283); Auden: Musée des Beaux Arts
(1471) and The Shield of Achilles (1479); Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn (938)
Also: John Donne: Apparition (295), A Valediction Forbidding Mourning (306),
The Flea (309), The Funeral (309), “Death, be not proud . . .” (320)
Assignment: Visit the Baltimore Museum of Art (open Wednesday through Sunday).
Choose an artwork of any kind—pottery, sculpture, painting, etc.—and write an
“ekphrastic” poem. That is, write a poem that both describes the work of art and also has
an additional, literary justification for being interpreted in poem form. You are not
writing a report on the object; you’re using it as some form of meditation. Look to this
week’s reading for examples. (“The Shield of Achilles” is not strictly ekphrastic, but it
derives from the description in Book 18 of Homer’s Iliad of the artistic creation of
Achilles’ shield.)
Week 4: The Contemporary Voice
Reading: Hall: Mangosteens (1991); Graham: The Surface (1979); Gioia: Prayer (1972);
O’Hara: The Day Lady Died (1728); Merwin: Losing a Language (1744); Berryman’s
Dream-Songs, p. 1548-1552; Hall: Independence Day Letter (1756); Rich: Diving into
the Wreck (1797); Ramanujan: Breaded Fish (1802); Hughes: Pike (1812); Plath:
Morning Song (1837); Lorde: Echoes (1860); Simic: Prodigy (1892); Heaney:
Punishment (1900); Boland: “That the Science . . .” (1938)
Also: John Berryman, pp. 1547–1541
Assignment: Write any poem you like.
Week 5: Poetry of Wit
Reading: Hollander: Adam’s Task (1776); Larkin: This Be The Verse (1657); Hughes:
Theology (1813); Updike: V.B. Nimble, V.B. Quick (1846); Cope: Bloody Men (1947);
Parker: Résumé (1391); Fenton: God, a Poem (1965); Lear: The Owl and the Pussy Cat
(1042)
Assignment: Write a poem of wit. The use of clever, humorous, or ridiculous rhymes is
recommended, and a sense of irony is unsmilingly commanded.