Poetry and the Arts

This seminar explores how poetry sounds, in itself and in relation to other forms of sound-making, including singing, talking, laughing, and crying; the voices of animals, objects, and wind in the trees. We will study the disciplines of prosody and phonetics; consider accents, dialects, and the changing sounds of English over time and across the globe; and experiment with analog and digital techniques for analyzing and manipulating the acoustic properties of poetic language. Work for the course will consist of weekly experiments that split (or ignore) the difference between analysis and imagination.