"American Journal": Reading and Writing Poems for Our Time

In this course, we will read and discuss American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time and write our own poems in response to the themes, styles, and issues we encounter. We'll travel across what Robert Hayden called "a land of contrasts and contradictions, a place still new, still reckoning with the implications of its history," reading poems from the likes of Natalie Diaz, Ross Gay, Solmaz Sharif, Danez Smith, and Brian Turner, poems that Tracy K. Smith hopes "might go some way toward making us, whoever and wherever we are, a little less alien to one another." New writers welcome.