From Stanza, to Body, to Country: Crafting Place in Poetry

The poet David St. John observed, “Place in writing often exists at that intersection between the reality of place and one's imagination about that place – what one believes, hopes, or imagines about the various possibilities of oneself in that place.” How does place, in other words, reveal more than the physical setting itself, and the writer’s interiority and obsessions? In this craft class, we will consider the ways in which writing about place enables intimate conversations with the self, communities (both personal and public), and history. Each week, we will read poems and supplementary texts that foreground our discussions of place in a variety of contexts, such as food, architecture, nature writing, myth, and labor, to name a few.