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CCOG for WR 245 Spring 2024

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Course Number:
WR 245
Course Title:
Advanced Creative Writing - Poetry
Credit Hours:
4
Lecture Hours:
40
Lecture/Lab Hours:
0
Lab Hours:
0

Course Description

Covers writing poetry, having work critiqued by peers and the instructor, and critiquing the work of others in a workshop setting. Prerequisites: WR 242 or instructor permission. Audit available.

Intended Outcomes for the course

Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

  1. Analyze techniques and strategies a wide range of established poets demonstrate in their work and reflect upon one’s own values to develop one’s own personal poetics.
  2. Employ the various techniques and elements of poetry such as imagery, metaphor, line breaks, stanzas, alliteration, assonance, rhyme, meter and/or form, in increasingly complex ways.
  3. Employ self-reflection and techniques for employing the imagination to generate new poems and then to revise the poems, using techniques for “re-entering” or “re-seeing” a piece of writing.
  4. Employ critical thinking and problem-solving techniques to critique others' poems constructively and use criticism of one’s own poetry and self-reflection to revise one’s own poems for publication.
  5. Engage in the local poetry scene, becoming familiar with poetry websites, poetry awards, live poetry readings, poetry workshops, and publication opportunities, and submit manuscripts for publication or performance.

Integrative Learning

Students completing an associate degree at Portland Community College will be able to reflect on one’s work or competencies to make connections between course content and lived experience.

General education philosophy statement

English and Writing courses align with the PCC General Education philosophy by providing an appreciation of writing and literature from global and personal perspectives. Students in English courses engage the imagination, critical inquiry and self‐reflection, and in the process of doing so, cultivate a more complex understanding of their own culture(s), linguistic/communication practices, and perspectives in relation to others. Because the literary arts lie at the heart of most human cultures, they are essential for understanding ourselves and each other and navigating our differences. Like all artistic practices, Creative Writing allows us to process experience and, in doing so, discover and create meaning. In Creative Writing courses, students produce and revise original writing, workshop their writing and the writing of others, study literature, and learn about editing and publishing. Courses in creative writing empower students to realize themselves as writers. In the process, students nurture and harness their creativity, develop their unique writing voices, and explore interdisciplinary aspects of their craft — connections with art, music, and science, for example. Writing and Literature courses foster a stronger sense of engagement with history, culture, and society. Writing and Literature students develop an awareness of themselves as readers and writers in a global world, and an enlarged understanding of the relationships between language, identity, ideas, scholarship, communication, and transformation.

Course Activities and Design

Students write nine or ten short poems, conceived separately or as a collection, and perhaps keep a reading notebook based upon the readings for the course. These readings may consist of poems by established poets or essays about poetry drawn from one or more texts as the basis for discussion, reading aloud, or composition. A third of the course is typically taken up with such discussion of readings and presentation of techniques. The remaining two-thirds typically consist of the creative writing focus upon workshop, in which students in large or small groups learn to read aloud and constructively evaluate each other's poems, copies of which are provided to the class by the students.  Some instructors require anonymity, while others prefer that all poems be signed. These critiques may be written or oral, or both. All out of class writing should be typed or keyboarded. The instructor should spend approximately an hour of conference with each student outside of class.

Outcome Assessment Strategies

The course grade is determined by appraisal of the student's poems and of the student's participation in and contribution to the workshop process. Regularity of attendance and meeting deadlines for poems are essential to this process and may figure into the final grade. Instructors who assign reading notebooks or written critique on student poems may wish to evaluate these for completeness and quality of attention. Attendance policies vary with instructors.

Course Content (Themes, Concepts, Issues and Skills)

Abstract; accent; alliteration; allusion; ambiguity; amphimacer; anapest; Anglo-Saxon; apostrophe; archaic; diction; archetype; assemblage; association; assonance; aubade; automatic writing; avant-garde; ballad; ballade; blank verse; caesura; catalogue poem; chapbook; cliché; closure; collaborative poem; collage poem; conceit; concrete images; concrete poem; confessional poem; connotation; consonance; consonant rhyme; copyright; couplet; cover letter; dactyl; deep image; denotation; diction; dramatic monologue; dramatic verse elegy; empathy; end rhyme; end-stopped line; end-word; enjambment; envoy; ephemera; epic; epistolary; poem; ethnopoetics; etymology; euphony; extended metaphor; feet; feminine rhyme (double rhyme); figure of speech; foot; form; found poem; free verse; ghazal; haiku; hyperbole; iamb; iambic pentameter; image; internal rhyme; inversion; juxtaposition; language poetry; Latinate; light verse; line break; little magazines; line; lyric poetry; manipulated poem; masculine rhyme; meditation; metaphor; meter; metonymy; modern poetry; monologue; motif; multiple submissions; mythopoeia; narrative poetry; new formalism; objective correlative; off-rhyme; onomatopoeia; organic form; parallelism; parody; pastoral; pentameter; performance poetry; persona; personification; poem of address; poetic diction; poetics; poetry; poetry reading; print poetry; prose poem; prosody; pyrrhic; quatrain; repetend; repetition; rhyme scheme; rhythm; run-on lines; SASE; scansion; sense of place; sense of play; sentimentality; sestina; simile; slam; slant rhyme; small press; sonnet; spoken word poetry; spondee; stanza; stress; surrealism; syllabic verse; symbolism; synecdoche; synesthesia; tenor; tercet; tetrameter; title; tone; traditional forms; trimeter; trochee; vehicle; verse; villanelle; voice; writing workshop 

Instructors new to the course should contact the campus creative writing chair, creative writing sub-SAC chair, Comp/Lit SAC chair, faculty department chair, or administrative support person for further information.