In this class, you’ll be encouraged to lean into the sensory pleasures of the world around us, to use our bodies to bring the sensory world into our work more fully. We’ll write poems of sleeping late, binging bad tv, reading popcorn novels, and sneaking the last brownie at midnight. We’ll mine each activity for ways to deepen imagery in your poems, and examine the meta ways the activities themselves might serve your writing life. Each week, we’ll read 3-4 model poems, interspersed with short prose from Bored Panda, LitHub, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. From these readings, you’ll write new poems from a prompt linked to that week’s theme. Every week will also include optional viewing/listening assignments in order to give you multiple ways of approaching the prompt. You’ll draft 7-8 poems inspired by your obsessions, turned “poetry research” to allow indulgence to enrich your writing, even after the class is over.
