Poetry Curriculum

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About the Poetry Curriculum

The Stonecoast MFA program's commitment to poetry is profound and sustained. Every new poetry student at Stonecoast is enrolled in a special workshop on "Structure and Rhythm of Poetry," ensuring that you are exposed to the full range of possible tools for developing your poetic voice at Stonecoast. Every graduating Stonecoast poetry student takes a special class on how to perform your work, taught by Stonecoast alum and faculty member, the brilliant and compassionate world-renowned poet and performer Patricia Smith. In between, Stonecoast poets experience a phenomenal array of classes, conversations, and readings. By the end of your first 10-day residency, you will be brimming with ideas and creative energy.

Once the first residency is over, you will begin your first semester of individualized work with a mentor from Stonecoast's poetry faculty. You and your mentor will design a unique program of study, including a reading list of books suggested by each of you with your aims for the semester in mind; writing assignments geared precisely to your developing needs as a poet; and creative goals including such areas as voice and persona, meter and form, poetic procedure and structure, syntax and lineation, deepening the process of revision, and translation.

Approximately each month, you will send your mentor a packet consisting of revisions, new poems, any writing exercises you have agreed would develop your poetry, and "annotations" on the books you have been reading. While annotations often take the form of brief critical papers focused on a topic that you and the mentor have agreed on, they may also take the form of "imitations" of the style of particular poets when you think that might be a more useful approach. Throughout the semester, even if it means revising the original study plan or reading list, your mentor will work with you to make sure that all your work remains focused on developing your poetry to its fullest potential.

As you continue to build your craft, expand your knowledge of poetry, and develop your voice, your second residency and semester will be structured like the first. In your third semester, you will round out your understanding of poetry by completing a third-semester enhancement project. Stonecoast's six possible academic emphases (craft, theory, publishing, pedagogy, community service, and interdisciplinary collaboration) allow a student to pursue nearly any deeply held intellectual or artistic passion as an enhancement project. Recent enhancement projects in poetry have included archival work with Sylvia Plath's papers, Jungian interpretations of the persona poem, an internship at a small poetry press, a comparison of classical Japanese and contemporary African American poetry, hands-on experimental workshops in drumming and rhythmic writing, a poetry-dance collaborative performance performed in New York and Washington, and fieldwork using poetry in therapeutic settings and ESL classrooms.

Stonecoast offers a combination of in-depth knowledge and aesthetic breadth that is unique among poetry programs. Special workshop opportunities for poets during the residency, in addition to the ongoing Poetry Workshop, include Master Classes for graduating seniors and half-residency elective workshops in the Prose Poem, Meter, Speculative Poetry, Dramatic Monologue, the Sonnet, Writing to God, and our popular, student-initiated cross-genre workshop on Writing About Race. As a Stonecoast student, you also have the opportunity to gather a group of students and initiate a special elective workshop on any writing topic.

Each residency, a remarkable range of presentations by Stonecoast faculty and visiting poets addresses topics in poetry with in-depth discussion or writing exercises. Recent topics have included "Widening the Audience for Poetry," "The Poem's Argument," "Haiku and Ghazal," "Writing Poetry of the Family," Poetry and Philosophy," "Revisiting the Villanelle," "Portrait of A Middle School Poetry Project," and "Art and Activism," along with special student-led forums on topics from the ballad to how to organize your poetry submissions, and presentations on the work of poets Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, June Jordan, Csezlaw Milosz, Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens, May Swenson, and W.B. Yeats.

A lively mix of poets and editors visit each residency to give readings and presentations; recent and scheduled visitors include Stephen Dunn, Lisa Jarnot, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Marilyn Nelson, Alicia Ostriker, Joan Retallack, Reginald Shepherd, and Jack Wiler. Recent and scheduled poetry editors and publishers include Kate Gale (Red Hen Press), Jonathan Galassi (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), April Ossman (Alice James Books), and Jonathan Skinner (Ecopoetics).

University of Southern Maine