Rural Poetry: Writing Our Hometown, Community Interest Class

This course will serve as an introduction to the writing of poetry with intensive practice in poetry writing in a community-oriented classroom. The course combines the study of published poetry with the study of craft. We’ll dive deeply into texts that interrogate rural spaces: the place where town meets country, humanity collides with nature, and you can see the mountains from your back porch. After this analysis, we’ll ask, “How do we capture this space in our own poems?” and write. Students will leave the class having written poetry that engages with the rural, the place we call home, and the work of their classmates and well-known established poets.