TRAUMA & ITS AFTERMATH: POETIC FORM(S) O

“After a great pain, a formal feeling comes —" 

—Emily Dickinson 

The history of literature has, in many ways, become inseparable from the history of trauma. Poetry can be an excavation site of memory and the subconscious dreamscape, and inevitably, trauma is what is unearthed there. Poems working with, through, and out of personal and collective trauma can create what Dorothea Lasky calls “the material imagination;” a shared world inhabited by both poet and reader long after the poem has been read—a physical space we are in together that helps us move through, process, and in the best of cases, rewrite trauma into the generative and healing space of metaphor and imagery. In this way, poems are—in both their content and their form (which are often are indivisible)—an invitation to the reader to access the depths and complexities of the human psyche that we are all connected by, perhaps in a way they might not have before. The poem creates a finite terrain that anchors infinite possibility. This class will study texts that stem from, speak to, document and process historical, ecological, collective and personal trauma. How can a poem hold, house, and reconfigure traumatic events for both reader and poet through its formal and thematic architecture?