Putting On the Style: How the Style of a Poem Reinforces, Qualifies, or Undercuts Its Message
LIT11-10-Thu1
Jan Schreiber
This course will take place virtually on Zoom. Participation requires a device (ideally a computer or tablet, rather than a cell phone) with a camera and microphone in good working order and basic familiarity with using Zoom and accessing email.
September 12 - November 21
(No Class October 3)
Style is everywhere. People dress in style, speak in style, and write poems in style. Style says a lot about a writer. Develop an eye – or an ear – for style and you will learn more information than literal meanings can convey. By surveying poems over a wide stretch of history, this course will examine the various guises of verbal style, the elements of language that poets manipulate to produce a recognizable style, and the ways readers react when they encounter a poem in a particular style. As we study poems by writers from Shakespeare to Lin-Manuel Miranda, we will see how words, phrases, and entire concepts can be manipulated to produce a subtext that expands, qualifies, or even contradicts the surface message. Class members will take an active role in identifying and describing the stylistic signals embedded in many well-known and some lesser-known poems.
More facilitated discussion than lecture.
No books are required, though some may be recommended. All poems that students are asked to read will be provided in the syllabus.
Read all assigned poems thoroughly. Plan to devote 2–3 hours per week to preparation.
Jan Schreiber received a PhD from Brandeis in 1972, taught at Tufts and UMass Lowell, edited a literary magazine (Canto), and inaugurated the Godine poetry chapbook series. An author of five books of poetry and many critical articles, he has been an SGL at BOLLI since 2012. His critical book Sparring with the Sun was published in 2013, followed by poetry books Peccadilloes in 2014 and Bay Leaves in 2019. He was poet laureate of Brookline, Massachusetts from 2015 to 2017. He published The Poems of Paul Valéry in 2021. He is an advisory editor with Think magazine.