This seminar focuses on four areas. First is the creative writing of poems; second, the poetics that structure/undergird/infuse/generate the poems. Third, you will shape your original poems into material texts that deploy the books arts and material history in the tradition of chapbooks production. Finally, you will “re-materialize” selections of these poems in digital forms that exhibit conscious experimentalism and theoretical awareness of the new multimedia and cyber dimensions inherent in 21st century technologies of the arts. Students will engage in historical and contemporary debates on the nature of poetics, and thence arrive at their own manifestos on the art of poetry. Examples of canonical and experimental works, chapbooks and e-poetry will be examined in the course of the seminar. We will be conversing as well with Santa Barbara poets. Students will complete the seminar with a Spoken Word performance.