Button University: Jalen Eutsey Workshop

Scholars sometimes devote themselves to excavating a poet’s influences, their literary lineage. Some have even argued that poets can be tormented by the example of their forbearers. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot wrote, “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.” In this course we will focus on the poetic inspiration for individual poems. We’ll invite influence into the room, treat individual poems as creative models as we attempt to learn a little more about the literary past. We will tease out the explicit and sometimes invisible links between poems and draw upon these insights for inspiration. This class should give you places to turn should writers block ever strike and you need models to kickstart your creativity. Some of the poets whose work we’ll consider include Gwendolyn Brooks, Galway Kinnell, Ross Gay, Major Jackson, Terrance Hayes, Allen Ginsberg, and Wanda Coleman.