In this seminar our two main themes are book building and diversity. We will read early books by a diverse group of poets writing in English from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first: Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Lee Young Li, Rita Dove, and CCA MFAW graduates Steffi Drewes and Nick Johnson. We will be looking not only at beginnings but also at how writers put their books together and what overall themes they present. What guides their choices on structure? And how do these early books prefigure or compare with their later work? We will also examine the influence of gender, queerness, ethnicity, and culture and how these writers expressed their identities.

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