Grackle image by Claire Valtour.
“that the poles of lyric and narrative have helped me navigate the blank night of the page. They’ve helped me to think, in particular, about how time functions: With narrative, a focus on action centers time; with lyric, the suspension of time centers language.” – Will Harris
Are you a lyric or a narrative poet? Or neither? Or both? Or are you scratching your head right now, with an inkling but no certainty about what either word means? In a writing form like poetry, where many poets themselves can’t agree on what a poem is, you might be asking why it even matters where you stand. In this class, we’ll explore how these modes work now, how they’ve worked historically, and how we can weild them today to strengthen and to understand our own places as poets.
You won’t have to muzzle yourself or swear allegiance to any category or form here, but we’ll write a lot of poems, in a lot of ways, and figure out how lyricism, story, and thier many adjacent parts might help you create new, interesting spaces for your own poetry.
To help us along, we’ll read the work of poets like Terrance Hayes, Joy Priest, Roger Reeves, Jean Valentine, Tony Hoagland, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Paul Celan, Diannely Antigua, Natalie Diaz, Solmaz Sharif, and Courtney Faye Taylor.
Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, TX and received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. He is a 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar, 2019 Juniper Summer Writing Institute scholarship winner, 2019 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics fellowship finalist, received the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, 2020 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing finalist, and a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient. His work can be found in Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Conduit, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, Grist, and Indiana Review. His chapbook Fracture Anthology is currently out with Ethel and his debut poetry collection Grace Engine is out with the University of Wisconsin Press.