Please note: This class will now have online meetings. Your teacher will contact you with information on how to join the online classroom. To participate, students must have a stable internet connection with a computer or device with a webcam and microphone.

This class, for anyone interested in writing poetry, is a creative exercise in learning new ways to write your own poems by riffing off of Ancient Greek, and Latin poems, with other literary works  from those periods as well. Poem, poet, poetry, epic, lyric, drama, ode, eclogue, tragedy, comedy and elegy are all words whose origins are Greek. Sappho, whose lyric poetry provides shapes in language for the wildest desires and needs, the most far reaching of potential; Homer, translated by Pope, who gives us road maps for what a person is, can be and can fall trying to be. Virgil, who picks up the thread of his epic from Homer’s, then gives us a map not only for human experience but for empire, as well, and for the grief inherent in such projects. Anyone who writes poetry, drama or prose can participate happily in this process of reading, discussing, satirizing and honoring such precursors. Make it Ancient, and then make it yours.