College and University Courses

The Center has commissioned leading scholars and educators to create materials for self-study or classroom courses on topics of visual art, music, film, poetry, and popular culture. Each course includes a semester’s worth of readings, discussions, and assignments. Are you ready to learn? Or would you like to take these materials and use them at your school?

The courses are by: Laura Allred Hurtado, Jeremy Grimshaw, Lance Larsen, Eowyn Wilcox McComb, Mason Kamana Allred, Kimberly Johnson, and April Makgoeng.

Lance Larsen Lance Larsen

Contemporary Religious and LDS Poetry

By Lance Larsen

To provide an historical overview of postmodern and contemporary poetry.

To sharpen through discussion and writing your analytical and evaluative skills.

To provide a detailed reading of the work of eight contemporary religious poets (four of them LDS)

To make you better readers of both fixed form and free verse poetry by concentrating on poetic elements such as rhyme, rhythm, meter, syntax, diction, style, enjambment, irony, imagery, symbol, and persona.

To help you apply a variety of critical approaches and reading strategies (formalist, historical, sociological, biographical, psychological, archetypal, feminist, post-structuralist, etc.) to contemporary poetry.

To emphasize the ethical responsibilities of reading.

To have a walloping good time.

“To untie [ourselves], to do penance and disappear / Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.” (Charles Wright).

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