Advanced Poetry

All Creative Writing majors must take at least one advanced course during their time at Susquehanna. I chose to take Advanced Poetry, which would surely surprise my freshman year self who was so set on taking Susquehanna's novel writing course. Advanced Poetry has about eight students, and it’s a night class that happens once a week. During class, we usually discuss at least one book of poems, do some sort of poetry exercise to generate more material, and workshop (which is discussing someone's work and critiquing it) some of our classmates’ poems. By the end of the semester, we will all have completed drafts of book-length poetry collections. This means writing a lot of poems—about fifty pages or so of material!

In our class, we are aiming to create coherent collections revolving around some central ideas, images, themes, or sources, rather than collections that are merely our best work slapped together. The thread holding my collection together keeps changing as I continue to work on it. At the beginning of the semester, I had decided I wanted to use pop culture, specifically pop culture aimed at a female teenage audience, as a source. I turned in 4 poems for workshop that were pop culture-inspired. After my workshop, I didn’t feel as if my subject was working. The poems weren’t conveying what I wanted them to say--mostly because I wasn't sure what I wanted them to say. I knew, though, what people were reading into it wasn't what I had intended. I decided to go back to the drawing board and was attracted to the idea of sacraments. Writing about pop culture had been my attempt to remove myself from my usual subjects—religion, theology, etc.—but I was drawn back anyway!

During my next workshop (for this one, I had to turn in fifteen pages of poems), my professor and some of the other students suggested that I could bring these subjects together. Their comments have allowed me to see a broader concept behind my collection. I intend to explore topics like performance, the truth or transformation that accompanies performance, ritual and worship in religious and pop culture settings.  I also felt encouraged by that workshop to dive into my subject matter on a more personal level. The poems I submitted to my class bounced around between different fictional speakers, but many were reading them as if they were one speaker and wanted to know more about that speaker. In my next set of poems due for class, I'm experimenting with drawing more directly from my own experiences. 

This Friday, I’ll be turning in that next set of poems--another fifteen pages. It’ll be interesting to hear what the class has to say! I’m not quite sure how I feel about many of these poems, so I think whatever their reactions are, it’ll be a lot of help.

Right now the prospect of finishing a book-length poetry collection is fairly daunting, but I’m sure I’ll be happy I was pushed to do so when I have so much to work with once the class is completed. I hope this will provide me with the motivation--and the material--to more seriously pursue poetry publication.