Poetry

Poetry I: Introduction to Poetry Writing

Nicholas Samaras

"Writing Poetry as an Expression of Heart and Soul"

In this introductory course, we take you seriously as a growing writer, and examine the individual breath of your poetry: in other words, we explore what it means to breathe in language as pnevma, or spirit. Each person’s breath and spirit has a measure and rhythm of its own. In this course, we will examine your current writing level, how you come to verbalize your self-expression, where you have come from in your writing and reading, and identify the stages and levels you need to next achieve in your journey. This course will honor and articulate both your spiritual and emotional growth markers. We will seek to give language and voice to the “icon” pictures within your personal experience. What we will end up with at the culmination of this study together will be the best-expressed reflection of your journey.

Poetry II: Intermediate Poetry

Nicholas Samaras

"Preparing Poetry for Publication"

In this intermediate study, we will recognize, identify, and verbalize the higher goals of achieving fluency in your growing craft as a writer. In other words, once you have written your work, the “real writing” of your work can begin. We will explore the core “images” of your work as both shape and message. How does the “re-vision,” the “re-seeing” of your poem transform your work once you address the concept of your audience? How does the form of publication affect your consideration of the structure of your writing and the choices you have made in it? We've shored up the foundation of your writing, now we test how your work stands against public evaluation. You’ve given your poems DNA and bodies. You’ve dressed them and prepared them for the world. How tall may your “children” (poems) stand on their own, and can they fend for themselves? At this level of study, we work with how to trust, let go, and watch.

Poetry III: Advanced Poetry Tutorial

Nicholas Samaras

"Private Dancer"

This six-part course will not look at individual poems but will focus on the heart of your work--your collected poems as they dance with one another. Each session will examine your work as an interrelated, living organism. This study is geared to examining your work as a whole: an eventual book. Do your poems “play nice” with each other? Does the whole become greater than the sum of its parts? Do the individual “members” of the poems function as a unified “body”? How may you identify and verbalize their “dance”? This study will function by examining an approach to creating an entire manuscript of writing. The limitations of this course will not address any finalized version of a complete manuscript. This tutorial will be limited to establishing a poetry-manuscript outline, an approach, and twelve poems establishing a structural identity of the intended manuscript.

Questions? Call Taylor Olsen at 206.281.2988, or email her at admin@glenonline.org.