Description

W.H. Auden wrote, “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

But what exactly makes a poem a poem?
Students will explore this question while attending an eight-week workshop, probing the various elements of this genre: rhythm, cadence, stanzaic structure, metre, image, voice and metaphoric language. Students will attempt a variety of poetic forms such as the sonnet, glosa and villanelle and will read examples of published work. Over the course of eight weeks, all students will create, workshop and revise a short portfolio of their own poems.

Your instructor: Paul Vermeersch holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph for which he was awarded the Governor General's Academic Gold Medal. He is author of four collections of poetry, of which the most recent, The Reinvention of the Human Hand (McClelland & Stewart, 2010), was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. He is the former poetry editor for Insomniac Press and the current senior editor of Wolsak & Wynn Publishers Ltd. He lives in Toronto and teaches courses in English and literature at Sheridan College.

Objectives

By the end of this course, students will demonstrate their learning in the following ways:
1) They will be able to offer insightful, constructive criticism on the creative work of their peers, and
2) They will have developed a personal and flexible writing style in poetry that is more sensitive to the sounds, moods, and evocative effects unique to the English language.

Assessment Method

Course Topics

This course incorporates reading and discussion of theory and technique, practical assignments, group work, peer workshops, and reading aloud to an audience,

The student will acquire knowledge and develop skills that promote a more thoughtful and effective use of language, both written and oral. The workshops will foster an environment of active learning in which students must not only make evaluations based on what they have learned in the course, but also synthesize and communicate solutions and suggestions that should help to improve the work of their classmates. In turn, students will benefit from the feedback of their peers when composing their own work.

Topics covered include:

• Developing a literary vocabulary
• Introduction to basic elements of form and metre
• Types of metaphors
• Rhyme
• Poetry forms
• Poetry and sound
• Rough drafts
• Alternative writing modes
• Submitting to journals and publishers

Course Prerequisites

There are no pre requisites for this course. All students are welcome.