This course takes its title from a Phillip Levine poem in his collection about growing up in working class Detroit, One For the Rose: “the odd music we and / the world have made of death.” Together we will cultivate our own “odd music” and study how poets like Levine, Lee Young Li, Evelyn Berry, Nate Marshall, George Ella Lyon, Airea D. Matthews and others make fantastic imaginative leaps in their poetry of personal history. As Jesse Graves writes in his critical volume Said Songs, “I think it is important to remember the mythic origins of literature and the role that local, even family, mythology plays in the development of a writer’s imagination.”

Class will meet virtually on Saturdays 10:00AM-12:00PM EST

May 23

May 30

June 6

About the Instructor

Annie Woodford is the author of Peasant (Pulley Press, 2025), Where You Come from Is Gone (Mercer University Press, 2022), recipient of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry, and Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019). Her micro-chapbook, When God Was a Child, was published by Bull City Press in 2023. She has been the recipient of the Thelma Smallwood Scholarship from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and the Jean Ritchie Fellowship. Most recently, she was part of the poetry anthology Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, proceeds from which go to support Hurricane Helene relief efforts.

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