This course is designed to offer teachers and others serious about poetry an opportunity to improve their skills at reading, writing and talking about poetry, and to discover raw materials unique to their own writing. Participants will learn to invent evocative writing exercises and, in a supportive workshop environment, share fresh and original work and refine the skills and observational instincts that result in the surprising image, the unexpected metaphor. Participants? writing will form a central activity of the course, and poems by contemporary masters such as former U.S. Poets Laureate Billy Collins and Ted Kooser, National Book Award Winners Ruth Stone and Mary Oliver, as well as Dorianne Laux, Sandra Alcosser, Jack Gilbert, Gerald Stern, and Wendell Berry will provide stimulus, inspiration and models of excellence. Through the classroom exchange, participants will receive individual attention to help them identify areas where their writing is strongest and to use these insights to write poems that surprise and to stimulate creative thinking and writing in young writers as well. Texts & Materials Picnic Lightning by Billy Collins (Pittsburgh) ISBN 0-8229-5970-5 One World at a Time by Ted Kooser (Pittsburgh)ISBN 0-8229-5366-8 House of Light by Mary Oliver (Beacon) ISBN 978-0807-06811-3 [You will also want some sort of notebook/journal for recording discoveries, quotations, ideas for poems, class notes, and a file folder for collecting handouts.]

Course Overview Each of our classes will involve both discussion of poems in reading assignment for that day or week as well as readings of participants? original or revised drafts of new poems and our collective responses. We will take turns creating the writing assignments (prompts) and as time permits try out some of these within the class time for completion outside of class. Handouts (noted below) will include primarily poems not in our assigned ?texts? in order that our experience of the range of poetry by our contemporaries is as broad as may be useful. We will strive to lend support for each other?s ideas and writing while providing a serious, respectful and appreciative audience.

Final grades will reflect the quality of individual attendance and class participation and a final portfolio that includes 1)the student's original poems and 2) a group of imaginative assignments (prompts) for generating original work by others (classmates, students or workshop participants).