Is It or Is It Like?: A Poetics of Comparison with Wendy Xu

What makes for a good comparison? And is it the same to ask: what makes for an interesting proximity of things, feelings, descriptions, and ideas? What are the political, ethical, and aesthetic considerations of comparison? In this course we will work at the craft level (with similes, metaphors, microcosms of comparisons) to try to compare uniquely, irreverently, subversively, surprisingly, beautifully, so as to help two or more things transcend themselves and share their properties interestingly with one another. We’ll engage the exciting differences between saying what is and what is like, in search of the wild power a truly precise (and unique) comparison can create. Texts and weekly writing experiments will inform our explorations, with an emphasis on generating our own original poetry. Work from Emily Dickinson, Bianca Stone, Tomaž Šalamun, Bei Dao, Roger Reeves and others will be considered.

Wendy Xu is the author of Phrasis (2017) and You Are Not Dead (2013), as well as the chapbook Naturalism (2015). She is the editor of iO: A Journal of New American Poetry and former curator of the jubilat / Jones reading series, and a 2014 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She has taught creative writing at Queens College CUNY and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

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