Leila A Wilson

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 poems, publishing only a few anonymously in her lifetime. Many know her as a recluse, ¿the woman in white¿ who rarely left her room in her family¿s home in Amherst, MA, though her poems prove her radicality, edginess, and performativity. Her poems¿ imagistic slants, lilting rhythms, and urgent breaks open possibilities that continue to inspire experimentation by poets and artists around the world. In this course we¿ll first ground our discussions by learning about Dickinson¿s life¿her family, friendships, education, cultural influences, and political contexts¿and we¿ll lean into her fascinations by slowly and closely reading her poems together. Then we¿ll spend time with some of her correspondence and see how her letters, along with her poems, enact and embody her queerness, feminism, environmentalism, and social critique. Digitized versions of her original fascicles, as well as some fragments and unbound sets, will allow us to examine her hand script and consider how her poems exist as physical art objects. Thrillingly, her poems invite and resist our knowing; they push back against easy summary and exert their own questions, satire, and sass. As we delve into her work, we¿ll also enjoy a diverse group of modern and contemporary poets and artists who have been sparked by Dickinson¿s poems, placing them in dialogue with Dickinson in our own expanded room.

This course is designed for students interested in writing series, sequences, chains, and cycles. Rooted in poetry but stemming into lyric essays and prose, students will build upon their own projects every week. We'll consider ways to cluster, compound, piece, and layer the language that propels our inquiries. We'll look at how sections and segments both relate and negate in work by Ishion Hutchinson, Wallace Stevens, Alice Oswald, Mónica de la Torre, Eleni Sikelianos, Cathy Park Hong, C.D. Wright, Inger Christensen, Simone White, Elizabeth Willis, George Oppen, and more. Students will be encouraged to research and experiment in response to weekly readings, regular workshops, and recurring conferences. By the end of the course, students will have written and revised a long poetic series or a hybrid sequence.