Course Description for

Poetry Fundamentals

with Paul Haenel

Registration Fee and Course Length

Prerequisites

Standard course: $180 / 6 weeks. Click here to register.

Extended schedule: $224 / 12 weeks. Click here to register.
Extended course is designed for busy people and gives you two weeks to do each lesson but contains NO additional material.

No prerequisites.

Course Contacts

Course Description

This course teaches approaches, understandings, and paths to attitudes that allow us to better learn what might unlock the poetry that's in all of us.

This is a basic course: There will be six topic lectures that will be emailed to the students, and secondary reading material. We'll also address difficulties you might be having regarding the progress of your own work, as well as reactions to and discussion about exercises I'll be assigning each week. These exercises are optional. It would behoove you to do them while you're taking the class (for obvious reasons), but they'll be there for you regardless, if or when you find yourself better disposed to addressing them later, on your own.

I will be working with you privately, providing tutoring, feedback, and guidance where I determine you might need it in your own poetry.

The goal of this class is not to teach you how to write, or to teach you how I write, but no one writes in a vacuum: We all have to get up on the shoulders of those who've come before us. For this reason I'll be asking everybody to provide me with a personal, growing anthology of poems you read throughout the course. Ideally I'd like to see you compile a selective anthology of at least sixty poems (you need only provide me with the titles and authors, of course), ten poems a week, by course end. The anthology does not have to be of contemporary or even "modern" work. . . it can be older poems, translations, whatever you wish. But it should be thoughtful: An anthology like this will tell me a lot about you.

This course will introduce you to elements that will help you make better determinations regarding poetry, and your own experiences in writing it.

Week 1: Overview
The importance of reading
Writing habits
The poem as an exploration

Assignment: Write as much or as little as you wish about how and when you first discovered poetry, what you feel your weakness and strengths are, and what your goals are.

Readings: Up to ten poems; essay by Hugo; intro & first two chapters of A Poetry Handbook (pp 1-12). Writing exercise

Week 2: Lecture "Historical Considerations"
What we've inherited
Prosody
Discussion of form (traditional form)

Readings: Up to ten poems; readings in text to be announced
Writing exercise

Week 3: Lecture "Aspects of the Image & the Line"
The primacy of image
Relationship of image to the whole
The line

Readings: to be announced
Writing exercise
Sending your anthology at the half-way point

Week 4: Lecture "Aspects of Open Form"
Organic form and contemporary poetry
Three distinguishing features of "modern" poetry
Schools of thought

Readings: A representative selection of up to ten poems, reading in text TBA
Writing exercise

Week 5: Lecture "Aspects of Process"
Approach and method
Imagination, creativity, personality, and identity
Movement

Readings: TBA
Writing exercise

Week 6: Lecture "Aspects of Revision and Editing"
The realm of criticism and the ego
Publication: why, when, where, and how

Readings
Sending final anthology
Writing assignment: feedback, comments, and so on. This will be your chance to critique the instructor.

Paul R. Haenel, has a BA in English (Creative Writing Option) from Penn State, where he studied poetry with John Haag and John Balaban, and fiction writing with Peter Schneeman and Paul West. Paul has recently worked in the MFA program at George Mason University, studying with Eric Pankey and Carolyn Forche.

Paul's poems have appeared in Antietam Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Poet & Critic, Poet Lore, Cottonwood, The Maryland Poetry Review, and many others. Paul's first volume of poems, Farewell, Goodbye, Wave Goodbye, was published in the spring of 1994.

Paul was among the founding members of the Poetry Workshop in the Writer's Club on AOL (1991), and was host of the shop from late 1995 until early '97.

Haenel has also published short fiction, and one of his stories was nominated in 1992 for a Pushcart Prize. He has written essays on poetry for the literary journal Twin Rivers Review. Most recently, his work has appeared in the anthology Line Drives, 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, edited by Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles, 2002, Southern Illinois University Press. Paul's most rercent poetry appeared in Two Rivers Review, The Potomac Review and Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller's Cabin, 1984-2001.