Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

1. Analyze techniques and strategies a wide range of established poets demonstrate in their work and reflect upon one’s own values to develop one’s own personal poetics.
2. Employ the various techniques and elements of poetry such as imagery, metaphor, line breaks, stanzas, alliteration, assonance, rhyme, meter and/or form, in increasingly complex ways.
3. Employ self-reflection and techniques for employing the imagination to generate new poems and then to revise the poems, using techniques for “re-entering” or “re-seeing” a piece of writing.
4. Employ critical thinking and problem-solving techniques to critique others' poems constructively and use criticism of one’s own poetry and self-reflection to revise one’s own poems for publication.
5. Engage in the local poetry scene, becoming familiar with poetry websites, poetry awards, live poetry readings, poetry workshops, and publication opportunities, and submit manuscripts for publication or performance.

Students write nine or ten short poems, conceived separately or as a collection, and perhaps keep a reading notebook based upon the readings for the course. These readings may consist of poems by established poets or essays about poetry drawn from one or more texts as the basis for discussion, reading aloud, or composition. A third of the course is typically taken up with such discussion of readings and presentation of techniques. The remaining two-thirds typically consist of the creative writing focus upon workshop, in which students in large or small groups learn to read aloud and constructively evaluate each other's poems, copies of which are provided to the class by the students.  Some instructors require anonymity, while others prefer that all poems be signed. These critiques may be written or oral, or both. All out of class writing should be typed or keyboarded. The instructor should spend approximately an hour of conference with each student outside of class.

The course grade is determined by appraisal of the student's poems and of the student's participation in and contribution to the workshop process. Regularity of attendance and meeting deadlines for poems are essential to this process and may figure into the final grade. Instructors who assign reading notebooks or written critique on student poems may wish to evaluate these for completeness and quality of attention. Attendance policies vary with instructors.

Abstract; accent; alliteration; allusion; ambiguity; amphimacer; anapest; Anglo-Saxon; apostrophe; archaic; diction; archetype; assemblage; association; assonance; aubade; automatic writing; avant-garde; ballad; ballade; blank verse; caesura; catalogue poem; chapbook; cliché; closure; collaborative poem; collage poem; conceit; concrete images; concrete poem; confessional poem; connotation; consonance; consonant rhyme; copyright; couplet; cover letter; dactyl; deep image; denotation; diction; dramatic monologue; dramatic verse elegy; empathy; end rhyme; end-stopped line; end-word; enjambment; envoy; ephemera; epic; epistolary; poem; ethnopoetics; etymology; euphony; extended metaphor; feet; feminine rhyme (double rhyme); figure of speech; foot; form; found poem; free verse; ghazal; haiku; hyperbole; iamb; iambic pentameter; image; internal rhyme; inversion; juxtaposition; language poetry; Latinate; light verse; line break; little magazines; line; lyric poetry; manipulated poem; masculine rhyme; meditation; metaphor; meter; metonymy; modern poetry; monologue; motif; multiple submissions; mythopoeia; narrative poetry; new formalism; objective correlative; off-rhyme; onomatopoeia; organic form; parallelism; parody; pastoral; pentameter; performance poetry; persona; personification; poem of address; poetic diction; poetics; poetry; poetry reading; print poetry; prose poem; prosody; pyrrhic; quatrain; repetend; repetition; rhyme scheme; rhythm; run-on lines; SASE; scansion; sense of place; sense of play; sentimentality; sestina; simile; slam; slant rhyme; small press; sonnet; spoken word poetry; spondee; stanza; stress; surrealism; syllabic verse; symbolism; synecdoche; synesthesia; tenor; tercet; tetrameter; title; tone; traditional forms; trimeter; trochee; vehicle; verse; villanelle; voice; writing workshop 

Instructors new to the course should contact the campus creative writing chair, creative writing sub-SAC chair, Comp/Lit SAC chair, faculty department chair, or administrative support person for further information.