Silly bus. Get it? Syllabus? Silly bus? Yeah? Yeah! Thanks to Declan McCullagh for this gorgeous photo from Burning Man -- check out his website, http://www.mccullagh.org, for more amazing photos.

Before each semester begins, I spend most of my time putting together the course descriptions for my syllabi.  I admit that, as a student, I at first ignored them; as a teacher, I at first dreaded them.  Now, however, they’ve become incredibly important.  Indispensable.  Instead of a quick plot summary of my class plans for the semester, each course description stands instead as a description of belief, of why each subject is important — and why the study of it, and the development of discipline, is important.  This semester, I’m teaching the class I’ve been excited about teaching since I took this job three years ago: forms of poetry.  Though some may see the study of traditional formal verse as antiquated and unnecessary and, well, just plain boring, I’m thrilled and excited and invigorated by it — and used (or tried to use!) my course description to describe why — and I figured I’d share it with the Blogosphere as well.

In the Kana preface to the Kokin Wakashū, Ki no Tsurayuki wrote that “… poetry has the human heart as seeds and myriads of words as leaves. It comes into being when men use the seen and the heard to give voice to feelings aroused by the innumerable events in their lives.” Here, Tsurayuki states that poetry comes as naturally to human beings as leaves do to trees and that it is an innate, instinctual reaction to the events of our lives. This is a sentiment shared by myriad writers, in Eastern and Western cultures. Voltaire wrote that “poetry is the music of the soul.” John Keats even uses the same metaphor as Tsurayuki, stating that “[i]f poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” For centuries, poets have asserted that poetry is a natural impulse – however, though this seems the opposite of natural to many poets working today, they referred to poetry which followed traditional, established forms and meters. In fact, Tsurayuki moves on to state that poetry was once a form of communication used and understood only by the gods. It is form itself – in the form of the thirty one syllable poem, or waka – which made poetry accessible to human beings. According to Tsurayuki, it is only because of traditional, established form that “conceptions and words became multifold and diverse as poets praised blossoms, admired birds, felt emotion at the sight of haze, and grieved over dew.” Today, most poets find such sentiments antithetical, eschewing traditional form and meter, arguing instead that each poem has its own organic form and that each emotion and story and idea is best expressed in its own unique form – but how did we get here? And what can we learn from the journey?

Poetry is an art which has existed for centuries, since language itself began. Therefore, as poets, we owe a great debt to history. Because the art is rooted in meter and structure and sound, we harken back to that history not only in lines which directly allude to the meanings of poems which came before us but in our structures, our syllabics, and our sounds. This is a class which pays homage to that history, tracing the global development of poetic forms and exploring how, in the West, poetry moved from verse to vers libre. We will learn about several versification systems, deeply exploring accentual-syllabic verse, the heartbeat of poetry in the English language. We’ll trace the development of a number of forms from their origin to their role in contemporary poetics and culture, whether this be the re-emergence of the traditional triolet or the move from the metered ballad in poetry to the power ballad in rock music. We will explore theories of formal verse and organic form, tracing the development of free verse from its roots in Biblical poetry and John Milton’s Samson Agonistes to contemporary experiments in erasure and analogue form. We will also study several modes which emerge and re-emerge in poems throughout the centuries, from occasional poetry to the elegy and the ode. We will work as a class to learn what poets have learned from each other and to find our own footing in the ever-shifting landscape of poetic form.