Advanced Poetry Workshop: The Walk of a Poem As Lyn Hejinian writes, “Language makes tracks.” Poets from Chaucer to Whitman to O’Hara have used walking as a poetic method, thematic subject, narrative device, and pedestrian act. The walk is literal and imaginary, metrical and meandering; it traverses urban grids and bucolic landscapes, junctions of space, time, and lexis. In this workshop we will read the topographies of poems, focusing on lyrical cities from Paris to Harlem, Thoreauvian ambles through woods and field, and other literary wanderings and linguistic itinerancies, in order to examine how language gets made and mirrored in the act of moving through place. Students will also set out on walks through the local landscape as they produce their own work. Students will address crucial questions and challenges focused on the craft of poetry through rigorous readings, in-class writing exercises, critical discussions, collaborations, and the development of a portfolio of writing, including drafts and revisions. By the end of the course, students will have engaged deeply with the practice of poetry, established a writing discipline, honed their skills, generated new work, explored by foot, and extended their sense of the possibilities of a poem. (Approval required; please apply online at http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/enam/resources/forms )  While this course is primarily online, on-campus students will have opportunities to meet in person with fellow students and the professor in small groups and during office hours, if circumstances allow. Off-campus students will be accommodated with additional optional online opportunities to connect.

Poetry and the Spiritual Tradition In this course we will examine the long and intimate connection between poetry and spirituality, looking especially at the influence of Christian thinking on such English and American poets as John Donne, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot. The course will begin with a study of the King James Version of the Book of Psalms, which deeply affected later British and American poetry. We will also read early Taoist and Islamic poets, including Lao Tse and Rumi. The course will conclude with a look at the work of several contemporary poets: Charles Wright, Louis Glück, and Mary Oliver. While this course is primarily online, on-campus students will have opportunities to meet in person with fellow students and the professor in small groups and during office hours, if circumstances allow. Off-campus students will be accommodated with additional optional online opportunities to connect. 3 hrs. lct.

The Structure of Poetry  This course is a workshop for beginning students in the field of creative writing. Students will read a selection of poems each week and write their own poems, producing a portfolio of their work at the end of the term. There will be an emphasis on revision. Students will be introduced to a range of forms as well, including prose poems, epistles, the tanka, the long poem, and the sonnet.

Modern Poetry This course will examine the nature and achievement of the major modern poets of Britain and America during the modern period, beginning with the origins of poetic modernism in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. The central figures to be studied are William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and W.H. Auden. The course will conclude with a look at some after-echoes of modernism in the work of Elizabeth Bishop and others. Two papers, one exam, with occasional oral presentations in class

Batter My Heart: Religious Poetry from the Psalms to Mary Oliver In this seminar we will look closely at some of the major religious poets (broadly defined to include a variety of traditions) in the course of English and American poetry from the 17th century writers John Donne and George Herbert to the contemporary American poet Mary Oliver. Major figures will look at include Donne, Herbert, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Charles Wright, and Mary Oliver.   There will be prose selections from various poets and spiritual writers, including Emerson.

Jay Parini

I thoroughly enjoyed this class. Jay Parini is a pleasure to have as a teacher. I came into the class intimidated because I had little background in creative writing and poetry. JP and classmates created a super welcoming and enriching environment. Easy grading, great atmosphere. Very glad I took this course.

Jay Parini is extremely passionate and makes the poetry you read really come to life. The class is small and very relaxed, with several students giving short, informal oral presentations on poems each week. It's mostly discussion based with one longish paper as a final exam. Great course!

This is the best class you will ever take at Middlebury. You will write two papers throughout the semester (midterm and final) and the entire class will be him reading poems and telling you stories about his life.