Poetry New York

The goal of Poetry New York will be to immerse students in an intense and various writing community, both as writers of poetry themselves and as critical writers. It is hoped that this daily contact with practicing writers, poets, translators, and publishers will advance each student's writing horizons and range of reading possibilities, demystifying the practice and profession of writing while inspiring students to advance in their own art.

This field study program features an immersion in New York City's poetry, literary and publishing worlds. We will spend three weeks on campus preparing for our trip by way of various readings in New York's literary history and in The New York School of Poets. The focus will be on the relationships between poetry and painting in the NY School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler, the connections between current publishers like Ugly Duckling Presse and New Directions and the writers they choose to publish, and NYC's international literary character. The program will then fly to New York City for five weeks, where students will pursue their own writing, write critical pieces on the poetry they hear at readings, and of the books they read for class, interview poets they meet, and be required to attend at least one event a day (or night) across the city: The Bowery Poetry Club, The St. Marks Poetry Project, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Public Library, and so on, are all options for students to pursue their writing. Local projects might include working on poems to appear in public spaces in the city, working collaboratively on translations of poets in town writing in other languages, or compiling a journal of field notes. Field trips will also be arranged to the offices of various publishers of the instructor's acquaintance to study, close up, the way in which literature is made. Some of these publishers might include: New Directions Publishing Company, The New York Review Of Books, Archipelago Books, Seven Stories Press, etc.

The final two weeks of the quarter will be spent back on campus in Olympia, debriefing, finishing poems and essays, and producing an anthology of our work.