Course information: How can purposefully shaped repetition—what in another context would be dismissed as perseveration—become a formal apparatus to enhance our ways of sensing and feeling?

In this six-week course, we will study forms such as the villanelle, pantoum, sestina, ghazal, sonnet, and triolet, and we will try our hand at writing three or four of them. In the process, we will deepen our sense of poetry as a kind of music beyond the mere meaning of words.

Join DJ and Ralph for this patterned extravaganza.

When: Sundays from October 8 - November 12, 2023 from 3-4:30pm Central Time  

Course fee: $40 (scholarship available)

Registration Deadline: September 29, 2023

How to register: Poetry and Pattern Course Registration

About the instructors:

DJ Savarese is the author of Swoon and A Doorknob for the Eye and a co-author of Studies in Brotherly Love. His poems have appeared in Belllingham Review, Deej, Nine Mile Magazine, Outcrop, Red Wheelbarrow, Seneca Review, Split This Rock, Stone Canoe, The Art of Autism, wordgathering, and Voices for Equity and Diversity in Education: A Literary Anthology.  A 2022/23 Iowa Arts and Zoeglossia Fellow and the co-producer, narrative commentator, and subject of the Peabody Award-winning, Emmy-nominated documentary, Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery, he created Listen2Us: Writing Our Own Futures as an Open Society Human Rights Initiative Community Youth Fellow and currently directs The Lives-in-Progress Collective at the Alliance. He has been teaching community-based poetry classes since 2016.

Ralph James Savarese is the author of two books of prose, Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption and See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor, and three books of poetry, Republican Fathers, When This Is Over, and with Stephen Kuusisto Someone Falls Overboard: Talking through Poems. His work has appeared, among other places, in American Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Galway Review, JAMA, Modern Poetry in Translation, Nine Mile Magazine, Poetry International, Rattle, Red Wheelbarrow, Seneca Review, Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, and Threepenny Review. He has taught creative writing for over thirty years and is Professor of English at Grinnell College in Iowa. 

Accessibility: This course will be held via Zoom. Closed-captioning will be provided, and the chat feature will be used for responses. Participants will have the option to voice their own responses, or to have them voiced via the class facilitator. All class materials will be provided a week in advance.

We look forward to welcoming you to this course!

This course is made possible with generous grant support from Illinois Humanities.