Theune to Speak on “Poetry’s Fitting Surprise” at Loras

Loras College with host a talk on surprises in creative writing, particularly poetry, from Michael Theune, PhD, on  March 1 at 7 pm on the third floor of the Miller Academic Resource Center.

Theune is Robert Harrington Endowed Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. His scholarly work focuses on contemporary U.S. poetry and poetics and on British Romanticism, especially the work of John Keats.

In his talk, entitled “Poetry’s Fitting Surprise,” Theune will explore some of the thinking about fitting surprise; consider how such thinking could affect creative writing – and especially poetry writing – instruction; and then, time permitting, conclude with a guided exercise in which participants will collaborate to make short, jolting-but-also-just-right poems.

Theune’s many publications include numerous book chapters and journal articles, as well as three books: he edited Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (2007), coauthored We Need to Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry (2018), and co-edited Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives (2019).