What can a lyric poem achieve that traditional journalistic reporting can't? Is there such a thing as an apolitical poem? How can poetry bend time and space in order to capture ever-shifting power dynamics?

Students will engage in close readings and discussions of landmark docupoetic works by authors such as Muriel Rukeyser, Tyrone Williams, Ed Sanders, Mark Nowak, Solmaz Sharif, Joe Hall, Carlos Soto-Román, and the incarcerated writer Justin Rovillos Monson, and they will come away from the workshop with strategies for capturing and compressing their own political realities in poems.

This class is taught by a graduate student in the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.