4-Week: Poetry of the Visual—Visual Art and Ekphrastic Poetry

In this course, we'll consider how visual art inspires, influences, and transforms poetry. Writers will generate new work by interacting with visual art and looking at examples of how established poets have used the visual as a jumping-off point or a direct inspiration for their own writing. Ekphrasis, or the written description of visual art, is a classic way poets have responded to visual art, and we'll look at examples such as John Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn." But poets have also used visual art in other ways, including recent examples of poetry comics, illustrated poems, and concrete forms. The goal of the course is for writers to create new poems that engage with or incorporate visual art.