Core Course

Bucknell in Barbados

Core Course

English 204: Creative Writing: Poetry (or English 308: Seminar in Writing Poetry)

This creative writing workshop will immerse in reading, writing, and responding to poetry.  The course will engage students in discusions of craft and aesthetics to enable them to think more carefully and critically about their own work as well as the work of published writers and of their peers.  Given the unique opportunity presented by our location in Barbados, the texts for the course will centre on Caribbean poetry.  Students will read the poems of writers such as Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison, Marlene Nourbese Philip, and Derek Walcott to strengthen their experience in and understanding of the Caribbean.  Writing exercises will be connected, whenever possible, to specific aspects of the Bucknell in Barbados experience.

Seminar Course

ENGL 391: Seminar in Contemporary Poetry (LITS3003: Contemporary Poetry)

The focus of the seminar will be on poetry written in the post-WWII period up to the present.  We will study writers primarily situated inside of the United States but with connections abroad, as well as those writers from abroad who have made America, at least partly, their home.  Writers we read may include Elizabeth Bishop, Eavan Boland, Agha Shahid Ali, Robert Hayden, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li-Young Lee, Sylvia Plath, Derek Walcott, and others.  Among other topics, we will consider the following: travel and trans-nationalism; issues of identity and of the construction of the self; and the tension that arises between personal and political expression.