The Department of Literatures in English will offer an online section of ENGL 11300 Introduction to Poetry this upcoming winter session. The course can count within the ICC "Themes and Perspectives" category as either a Humanities course or as a Creative Arts course. It is also themed both within "Identities" and "Inquiry, Imagination, and Innovation."
The course instructor is Dan Breen. The course will convey four credits, and run as a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous class meetings.
The goal of the class is to explore the ways in which lyric poetry produces its effects, how it works, and what capacities it might possess as measured against other forms of writing (such as narrative). We will also concentrate on developing fluency in poetic language. Poetry possesses a remarkable capacity to compress patterns of thought and intensify emotions in order to articulate experiences that other forms of writing struggle to express. This peculiar expressiveness of poetry results in part from the different and often complex registers of language within which poems construct comparisons, work out problems, and think through questions.
Please contact Dan Breen via email (dbreen@ithaca.edu) with any further questions about the course or feel free to drop in during his fall 2023 office hours: Tues. 11-12 and 1-2, and Thurs. 11-12 in 302 Muller.