How can poetry help us to process and respond to uncertainty? How might it teach us to grieve as well as heal? To counter isolation with connection? To generate energy and urgency around the crucial problems of our time? Poised, as so many of us are, between information-overload and a feeling of powerlessness in the face of injustice and strife, writing offers us the opportunity to tackle “the big stuff,” to transform our communities and ourselves through poetry’s magic. In this class, we’ll write brave poems that address timeless topics like death, love, God, war, and injustice, as well as timely issues such as the global pandemic and climate crisis. We will encourage each other to write about subjects that both attract and repel us through their enormity, inspired by a diversity of readings that may include Anna Akhmatova, Amiri Baraka, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Allen Ginsberg, Linda Gregg, June Jordan, Harryette Mullen, Wilfred Owen, Claudia Rankine, and Walt Whitman. We’ll discuss different approaches to these “big” topics, including tone (earnestness, humor, etc.), point of view, use of research, and form, but our focus will be on generative writing and experimentation. By the end of the class, students will have written and revised four new poems, expanded their identities as poets and people, and formed a community with other poets whose words aim to take on the world.