Preliminary Web Course Description
*Please note: This is a preliminary web course description only. The department reserves the right to change without notice any information in this description. The final, binding course outline will be distributed in the first class of the semester.

School of English and Theatre Studies

Course Code:
2940	Course Title:
Creative Writing—Poetry 	Date of Offering:
WINTER 2017	

Course Instructor:  Dionne Brand, Prof.	Course Format:Workshop/Lecture	

Brief Course Synopsis:
This course teaches Poetry writing. Students will gain an understanding of the basic elements of poetry writing: line, metre, imagery, rhyme, rhythm, syntax, and metaphor, sound and sense. Through practical experiments, collaborative poem writing and discussions, students will work on poetic forms such as the ballad, the sonnet, the blues, the villanelle, the sestina, the ghazal, the haiku, the renga and the pantoum. Alongside this attention to form, the class will explore the histories of global poetries and their relationship to the world in which we live. 

Through reading assigned texts and active participation in the writing workshops students will come to know poetry as grounded in every day structures of thinking and hone their skills as creative writers, critical and complex thinkers.	

Methods of Evaluation and Weight:
Writing Exercises/Assignments, 20%
Students will be required to participate in in-class writing exercises leading to the creation of one poem per week toward their chapbook. 

Collaborative Poem/Renga, 20%
Students are expected to actively participate in making and editing a Collaborative poem or Renga. 
Students will be divided into groups to do this assignment. Due Mid-term

Assigned Reading and Presentation, 20%
Students are expected to read the assigned book and bring to class a page of response consisting of: A) Drawing from the poems write two thoughtful paragraphs on what the book has made you think about.  B) choose the poem you admire and say why. You will be expected to share these paragraphs in class and these will be the bases of our discussions. Due bi-weekly.

10 poem/page chapbook, 40%

Grade Breakdown:
In Class Writing Exercises 20%
Collaborative poem/Renga, 20% (Due Mid term)
Assigned Reading and Presentation, 20%
10-page printed and bound chapbook of poems, 40% (Due after week 12)	

Texts and/or Resources Required (e.g. Internet access, specific textbook title, lab kit, etc.)
Small Arguments by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Personals by Ian Williams
Forage by Rita Wong 
Settler Education by Laurie S. Graham
Undark, Sandy Poole	
Other information that you wish share about the course (optional):
Course Learning Objectives:

By the end of the course, students will:

•	•	Have a knowledge of poetic forms.
•	•	Be able to revise and edit  
•	•	Be able to identify elements and techniques of poetry.
•	•	Have acquired skills of interpretation.
•	•	Have written a chapbook of ten poems; 
•	•	Have learned to be an active listener and responder to the work of others and their own.

List the distribution requirements that this course fulfills:

Canadian Literature