Body and Landscape: Poetry of the Inner and Outer Worlds

This course explores the poetics of the inner and outer worlds, treating both our bodies and the landscapes we inhabit as subject and source. Through embodied writing and sensory awareness, we’ll discover how external environments mirror internal states—and how personal truths can be found in the physical world around us.

Each week, we’ll focus on a different dimension of embodied writing: how the body remembers; how the senses generate language; how breath shapes rhythm; how landscape acts as mirror; how movement sparks discovery; how seasons and environment influence our creative cycles. Through short lessons, close readings, generative prompts, and in-class writing, you’ll explore the subtle exchanges between body and place, and experiment with writing from the body outward and from the world inward. In the final weeks, you’ll shape your drafts into a cohesive sequence, integrating revision strategies that help you trust your instincts and deepen the sensory life of your poems.

We’ll meet weekly on Zoom for craft discussion and generative practice, with time devoted to sharing work. Between sessions, you’ll upload poems to Wet.Ink, offer feedback to peers, and receive generous instructor feedback. Together, we’ll read poets such as Ross Gay, Lucille Clifton, May Swenson, Danez Smith, Natalie Diaz, Adrienne Rich, and others who blur the boundaries between what is felt within and what surrounds us.

By the end of the course, you’ll have a small portfolio of new poems, a deeper relationship to place and embodiment, and a stronger sense of your own poetic voice—one attuned to breath, movement, and the living world.

Who This Course Is For

This course is open to writers of all levels and backgrounds who are curious about writing from the body and the landscapes they inhabit. Whether you’re just beginning or looking to deepen an established practice, you’ll find space here to experiment, reflect, and reconnect with your creative instincts.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

In this course, you will: 

• Strengthen awareness of how poetic language transcribes lived experience.
• Experiment with sensory detail, movement, focused attention, awareness.
• Build confidence in drafting, experimenting, and revising that is embodied.
• Practice connecting external environment with internal emotional resonance.

Writing Goals

In this course, you will: 

• Produce at least 7 new poems.
• Develop a short sequence that integrates body and landscape.
• Refine your authentic voice through weekly feedback.
• Build a sustainable generative practice.

Zoom Schedule 

We will meet on Zoom each week on Wednesdays from 7-9 PM Eastern time. 

Weekly Syllabus

Week One: The Body Remembers

Introduction to embodied writing and body awareness. We’ll start by tuning into our physical selves and the landscapes around us, tapping into how our bodies carry experience. Readings will include Camille Guthrie’s “My Boyfriend,” May Swenson’s “Question,” Theodore Roethke’s “Epidermal Macabre” and Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Anodyne,” and other texts.

Week Two: The Land & Our Senses

Too often people think of ideas to write about, as if poetry lives in the head. Instead of looking for ideas, we’ll work from the senses to generate poetic language that readers conjure and experience directly in their bodies. We’ll read Jorie Graham’s “The Geese,” Michael Ondaatje’s “Cinnamon Peeler,” and Natalie Diaz’s “The First Body is Water.”

Week Three: Breath, Both Animal & Human

A poem is always, first and foremost, an embodied thing. We use our bodies and our breath to read poems out loud. That breath is like a drummer in the band. It’s the time-keeper and the rhythm-maker of the poem. We’ll read Bernadette Mayer’s “Walking Like a Robin,” Lynda Hull’s “Ornithology” and Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” and others, and compose pieces that bridge the human and the natural world.

Week Four: Landscape as Mirror

Is the landscape and outer weather a reflection of our inner weather, or the other way around? We’ll explore how external environments interact with internal states and read Joy Harjo’s “Remember,” Mark Strand’s “Old Man Leaves Party,” Yehuda Amichai’s “I’ve Grown Very Hairy” and C. D. Wright’s “Flame.”

Week Five: What the Unconscious Knows & The Places We Carry in Our Psyche

We feel our internal lives with the same intensity and sense of realism as we feel our external lives. And we can tap into those inner places to help us truly pin down our physical experiences. This week we explore phenomenal, immersive dreamscapes, read Mark Doty’s “Atlantis,” Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” and Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “Eve Revisited” and draft poems where the unconscious is the poetic speaker.

Week Six: Movement as Method & Discovery

It sounds woo-woo but it’s true. Movement is magic. And it doesn’t matter if it’s walking, dancing, running, swimming, or just wandering around, motion inspires creative ideas. The old Romantic poets knew it. William Wordsworth was an avid walker, and I have a feeling he didn’t do it to count steps. We’ll write poems that come from movement, and we’ll read Bernadette Mayer, Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” and William Carlos Williams “Dance Russe.”

Week Seven: Seasons, Environment & Change

Ever notice how our body needs awareness changes with seasons? How we cycle between times when our bodies seek rest and quiet, and times when they crave and create more stimulation? How, before a new start, we tend to pull back to restore ourselves? We’ll look at restoration and healing through Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” and Robert Hass’s “A Story About the Body” to explore how poetry speaks to wellness.

Week Eight: The Sequence

We’ll pull all the drafts together from the previous 7 weeks and integrate a few final creative writing techniques and revision strategies designed to inspire imaginative, less logic-bound revisions. All participants share some of their work and discuss how the approaches used have affected their writing and physical experience.

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$545.00 Original price was: $545.00.$465.00Current price is: $465.00.Enroll Now