Grackle art by Hilton Pond
Imagine: many of the poems we love best were written before we had electricity, phones, cars, or TV. Technology shapes our experience of time, and poems have long embraced such changes on molecular and metaphoric levels. As writers, we are now actively engaged in reshaping the literary tradition as face the challenges of transitioning into a digital age.
Do you ever find that all this technology overwhelms? You are not alone. Take a deep breath. This course is designed to reveal how this not-so-new-now technology can be mined to reinvigorate your poetic imagination and enliven your craft. We will read many contemporary poets, such as Terrance Hayes, Camille Guthrie, and Robyn Schiff, among others.
We will address our own digital literacy (Technophobes, this is not as scary as it sounds) and then trace our own personal deepdives into the emotional rabbitholes with which the internet consistently seduces us.
Once we take inventory of our personal rabbitholes, we’ll consider the manner in which formal emulation may offer us the tools to transform them into wormholes. Poems are inherently such: time machines that ferry us backwards and forwards through the human experience.
This is a generative course, and it will be fun. By the end of our six-weeks together, students will have responded to several prompts that directly address (emulate / combat) a myriad of contextual and formal possibilities shaped by our interactions with digital technologies.
The goal of this course is to mine potential subject matter, acquire formal chops, and produce a set of startling and exciting new poems.
Please note: Both technophobic and tech-savvy folks are encouraged to join! This course has something for every poet, no matter one’s degree of familiarity or finesse with online platforms.
Cate Marvin published her first two poetry collections, World’s Tallest Disaster (2001) and Fragment of the Head of a Queen (2007) with Sarabande Books. Her third book, Oracle, which appeared from Norton, was named a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2015. She has been a Whiting Award Recipient and a Guggenhiem Fellow. Her most recent book, Event Horizon, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2022. She is a professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and serves as a faculty mentor at the Stonecoast Low-Residency M.F.A. Program. She resides in Scarborough.