Advanced Poetry Seminar

Course Description


“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open,
there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”
– Czeslaw Milosz, “Ars Poetica”

In this course, we’ll greet the many “invisible guests” who populate the houses of our poems and ourselves. We’ll have conversations with them. We’ll pit them against one another in fierce debates. We’ll play wild Charades with them. We’ll wonder if they all can get along at our party. Readings for the course will focus on the modern and contemporary, but may include pop-in visits by the likes of Sappho, Rumi, Basho, Dickinson, and others. Nearer poets may include Inger Christensen, Jorie Graham, Tomas Tranströmer, Simon Armitage, Wislawa Szymborska, James Dickey, and Lucille Clifton. Weekly writing prompts will exercise students’ engagement with the poets and poetries at hand, and written feedback will mark their progress.

Participants

Fifteen poets hailing from Bahrain, Colombia, France, India, Italy, Kuwait, Mauritius, Mexico, Uganda, and Vietnam will participate in the seminar, selected from among a pool of eighty-seven applicants representing twenty-six countries.

Instructor

Micah BATEMAN is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award. His work has been shortlisted for Salt Publishing’s Crashaw Prize and appears in the Boston Review, Cutbank, Denver Quarterly, New York Quarterly, and Verse, among others. He has taught poetry and literature courses at the University of Iowa as a workshop student and as a Postgraduate Provost’s Fellow in Poetry. He is currently the editor of PetriPress.org, an online poetry journal.

Happening Now

  • Congratulations to our colleagues Jennifer Croft and Aron Aji, who are among those serving as judges for the National Book Awards this year, in their case in the category of translated literature.

  • Ranjit Hoskote’s speech at the 2024 Goa Literary Festival addresses the current situation in Gaza.

  • In NY Times, Bina Shah worries about the state of Pakistani—and American—democracy.

  • “I went to [Ayodhya] to think about what it means to be an Indian and a Hindu... ”  A new essay by critic and novelist Chandrahas Choudhury.

  • In the January 2024 iteration of the French/English non-fiction site Frictions, T J Benson writes about “Riding Afrobeats Across the World.” Also new, a next installment in the bilingual series featuring work by students from Paris VIII’s Creative Writing program and the University of Iowa’s NFW program.

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