We, the students of Artist, Activist, Deep-sea Diver: The Role of the Poet in Society, an Arcadia University seminar, would like to welcome you to our online literary journal. In this journal, we offer you our thoughts and feelings about poetry, in addition to some of the work we’ve produced. This course concerns poetry’s inherent place within ourselves and the world. Throughout our studies of the many faces of established poets, we were asked to assume those roles as well and produce poems inspired by a variety of prompts – some strange, some silly, some making us reach deep into ourselves.
Several activities and assignments took us outside of the classroom:
- We traveled to Newark, NJ to attend the Dodge Poetry Festival (http://www.dodgepoetry.org/) and helped create dialogue between artist and audience.
- We hosted a Symposium featuring fifteen published poets from our campus and the surrounding area (http://www.flickr.com/photos/arcadiaunivnews/sets/72157631852419751/with/8122917892/)
- We interviewed poets, some of whom we met at the Symposium, about their work and crafted Profiles in the style of literary journalism. This interaction gave many of us more of an understanding of ourselves.
What poetry offers cannot be easily described. Through poems, we found, we are able to express ourselves and document the world around us in powerful and unconventional ways. One can find freedom in the structure of form poetry or break free from conventions and find his or herself creating on a lawless and restrictionless canvas.
We want you to know that when we walked through the door on our first day, not everyone considered themselves to be a poet. Hell, some of us had never even written a poem in our lives.
Therefore, if nothing else, we would like those explorers of this site who are unfamiliar with poetry to look past improbabilities to what’s possible. Free yourself from the laws of prose, cultivate your voice, develop a new self-consciousness of artistic expression, and you will become a poet yourself.
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