Faculty Course Description
ENG301W: Creative Writing
Dr. M. E. Cooley
Professor
Office: Evans 233A
Office phone: 233-4078
e-mail: mcooley@berry.edu
I. Course Description:
The class demands that students come prepared to take part in discussion and analysis of poems by professional poets as well as poems produced by members of this class. We will often work from reading assignments in Writing Poems by Robert Wallace.
Your ability to participate in class discussion and to write poems will be directly related to time spent out of class preparing for class. The class will analyze both form and content of poems, how they are created in poems of recognized poets as means to understand how those elements might be created in your own poems. The class will also listen to and then discuss poems written by members of the class.
II. Text: Writing Poems by Robert Wallace, 5th edition.
III. Purpose:
A course in creative writing has a natural purpose to enhance students' intellectual awareness of language, self, and society as well as to cultivate an awareness of the world around us. Writing poems causes one to examine and comment upon those elements.
IV. Goals for this course:
• To practice writing a variety of poetic forms.
• To discover and to attempt to master the basic problems one confronts as a writer of poetry rather than as a reader of poetry.
• To learn to analyze one's poetry as well as the work of others in order to be able to make informed commentary and critical judgments about poetry.
• To learn how to revise the form and content of poems such that succeeding drafts of a poem more nearly achieve the poet's intended intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic effect upon his/her reader.
• To come to a more mature understanding of what poetry is and what is involved in the attempt to create poetry