Four Mondays, February 17 through March 10, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Finding inspiration in surrealism, camp divas, modern painting, and popular culture, the New York School helped reimagine everything from the lyric to long poems, playlets to pantoums, prose texts to performance art, art criticism to collaboration. This eclectic group of writers has had an inescapable, liberating, and oftentimes polarizing effect on contemporary poetic practice. In this class, we’ll explore the poetry, aesthetics, history, and continuing legacy of the New York School of poets. While we will focus on poems by John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, we will also discuss work by other writers associated with the New York School—such as Barbara Guest, Kenward Elmslie, Joe Brainard, and Douglas Crase—contextualized within discussion of the art, music, influences, lifestyles, sexualities, and politics of the milieu in which these writers conversed. Classes will require reading poems and criticism for homework, and will center around discussion of texts. This is a literature course with an emphasis on interpretation of poems and understanding the processes, poetics, and contexts of an important movement. The class will offer students the opportunity to produce critical responses, create presentations, engage in collaboration, and may also include opportunities for creative writing exercises and experiments.

Tuition: $120.00 + $30.00 course material fee = $150.00 total

The registration period for this course opens on January 1, 2014. Please check back then for a link to the online registration form.

Will Cordeiro

Will Cordeiro received his MFA from Cornell University, where he is currently completing his Ph.D. in literature. His recent poems are published or forthcoming in burntdistrict, Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Fourteen Hills, Sentence, South Dakota Review, Verse online, and elsewhere. In addition, his essays and reviews may be found at CutBank online, Jacket, and New Walk