Writing a poem is always a vulnerable undertaking, but it becomes an even more delicate and dangerous act when we as people rather than as poets are implicated in the act. The Latin root of the word humility, “humus,” means "of the earth." So to humble ourselves inside the poem—to attempt to answer the question of what we’ve sometimes gotten painfully, harmfully wrong as we’ve moved through the world—is work that requires getting a little muddy. What might it be like for our poems to get down in the dirt, to put ourselves and our poems at worm level? In this class, we will concentrate on writing towards the places in our poems where humility manifests itself as a clarity of vision of ourselves in relation to the world. We’ll accomplish this through reading, drafting, and revision that asks each of us to create a poetics of humility that yields not a poem of regret but of wonder—at change, at realization, at the endless, humble prospect of still-to-be-seen possibility.
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