The Program in Poetry and Poetics brings together a diverse community of literary scholars, poets, and translators working on poetry and poetics across a spectrum of regions, historical periods, and theoretical approaches at the University of Chicago. The faculty includes experts on classical Chinese poetry, the French avant-garde, the modern reception of archaic Greek poetry, and contemporary British and American writing. The program seeks to expand the critical understanding of poetics as a field that encompasses not only the study of poetry, but various aspects of literary theory, media studies, and historicist models of inquiry as well. Because many of the faculty members and graduate students presently engaged in the study of poetry and poetics at the university are publishing poets, the program also fosters work that crosses the border between critical thought and creative practice.
Selected Faculty
Sample Courses
Poetry Workshop I (CRWR 30306) Autumn 2026, Winter 2027, Spring 2027
This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading poetry, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore precise imagery, unpredictable figuration, intentional musicality, the use of line and stanza, and the relationship between form and content. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Poetry Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Poetry Workshop II. (Garin Cycholl, Suzanne Buffam, Nathan Hoks)
Creative Writing Studio: The Comic Muse - Humor in Poetry (CRWR 40242) Spring 2027
Humor is often treated as poetry's guilty pleasure — the thing serious poets do between serious poems. This seminar rejects that premise entirely. From the ribald fabliaux of medieval verse to the deadpan surrealism of Russell Edson, from Swift's savage ironies to Natalie Shapero’s sardonic restraint, comic poetry has always been doing the most sophisticated work: puncturing authority, negotiating pain, and telling the truth at an angle. We will study humor not as decoration but as epistemology — a way of knowing and saying what other modes cannot reach. Topics include: the rhetoric of the joke; bathos and anticlimax as poetic structure; the long tradition of parody and mock-epic; nonsense verse and its philosophical undertow; the relationship between comedy and elegy; and the political uses of irony and satire. Students will read widely, write critically, and compose original comic poems in a range of modes. (Suzanne Buffam)
Poetry Workshop II: Poetry as Parasite (CRWR 43136) Winter 2027
Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts. We’ll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating…) and test out these methods in our own writing. Students should expect to engage with the basic question of how their work relates to other poets and poems. Expect to read a substantial amount of work by modern and contemporary poets, submit new original poems for workshop, complete intertextual writing exercises, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers’ work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work. (Nathan Hoks)
Poetry Workshop II: The Sonnet Sequence (CRWR 43145) Spring 2027
The sonnet form has a unique place in Western poetics--as a site for affective expression, formal exploration, and poetic narration. This advanced poetry workshop takes the historical tradition of the sonnet sequence--from the early modern period to contemporary avant-gardes across a range of languages and regions--as a model for serial lyric form. Authors will range from Petrarch, Dante, Sidney, and Shakespeare to Tonya Foster, Ed Roberson, and Wanda Coleman. (Please note students will *not* be required to write sonnet sequences!) Writing exercises will explore questions of lineation, recursion, seriality, and poetic narratology. (Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy)
Breathing Matters: Politics and Poetics of Air (ENGL 50430) Autumn 2026
The participants in this seminar will be asked to re-examine the notion of “inspiration” in its aesthetic and historical senses, revisiting age-old textual and arts practices based on tropes of channeling, as well as contemporary practices based on embodied, performative and geopoetic notions of interconnection, circulation, receptivity and transmutation—including practices that reflect and refute the denial of the innate interconnectivity of beings. We will delve into the workings of air as an animating element that bridges and binds individuals to both internal and external forces—controllable and uncontrollable, state-sponsored and ambient, or what we would call “natural” under anthropocene conditions. We will examine the modern and contemporary politicization of air as a commons, and will apply our research to the analysis and critique of industrial and post-industrial landscapes. The imagination of air itself becomes central to thinking about utopian or dystopian collectivities in a time of respiratory crisis. Authors to be studied will include Coleridge, Shelley, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mira Holzbachová, Ant Farm, Meredith Monk, M. NourbeSe Philip, Mladen Dolar, Cecila Vicuña, Adriana Cavarero, Jordan Scott, JJJJJerome Ellis, Achille Mbembe, and more. (Jennifer Scappettone)
A list of course offerings specific to Creative Writing can be found at the Creative Writing course page. Literature courses related to Poetry and Poetics can be found on the English course page.
Poetry & Poetics Specialization
The Poetics Specialization allows students to structure their coursework and thesis around the study of poetry and poetics within MAPH. Students who complete the following requirements will receive a Poetics transcript notation:
● MAPH Core course (Foundations of Interpretive Theory)
● One Foundational Poetics Seminar
● One Pre-Romantic Poetry course
● One Non-Anglophone Poetry course (can be studied in translation)
● One Modern or Contemporary Poetry course
● Complete a thesis with a relation to poetry and poetics under the supervision of a Poetics faculty member
Please direct any questions you may have about specializing in Poetry + Poetics to maph-support@uchicago.edu.
Recent Poetics Thesis Projects
"Fred Wah’s Extensional Poetry"
Henie Zhang, MAPH '26
Advisor: Bill Brown
"Necrologistical Poetics of Raul Zurita’s The Country of Planks"
Philip Kostov, MAPH '26
Advisor: Jennifer Scappettone
"Poems to a Woodworker, and A Brief Essay on Susan Howe"
Zachary Jones, MAPH '26
Advisor: Nicholas Twemlow
Books on Tape (Poetry Collection)
Alexis Chilson, MAPH ’25
Advisor: Ryan Van Meter
Undertaking (Poetry Collection)
Li Linxuan, MAPH ’23
Advisor: Margaret Ross
"Love, Poetry, and Meaning in Percy Shelley’s Jane Williams Poems"
Erkut Soyer, MAPH TLO '22
Advisor: Frances Ferguson