Dan Chiasson
Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English
Poet and critic.
I write poems when I am able; I write other stuff the rest of the time. I have been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 2000. I also write regularly about poetry, politics, art, and popular music for The New York Review of Books. I have published six books, most recently The Math Campers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). My next project is a book about my hometown and the role it played in shaping the ideas and career of Bernie Sanders: Bernie for Burlington: Politics and Change in One American Place (Alfred A. Knopf, 2026). I enjoy teaching poetry of all periods, with an emphasis on recent American poets.
Education
- B.A., Amherst College
- Ph.D., Harvard University
Current and upcoming courses
Poetry of Louise Glück
ENG352
An advanced seminar in the poetry of Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. We will read Glück's entire oeuvre, from Firstborn (1968), written partly in late adolescence and expressing the passions and fears of a young person, to Marigold and Rose (2022), written for her infant grandchildren. Glück's subjects were the phases and cycles of ongoing life. She explores the experiences of being a child, wanting a child, having a child, having grandchildren; of being part of relationships and communities--a marriage, a village, friendships, artistic collaboration, a college faculty--and of leaving behind, or being excluded from, those structures; of finding passionate comfort in art, music, poetry, TV, gardening, cooking; of facing illness and disability in a changing body; of being a woman in a patriarchal culture and in an art that favors men. These subjects and others were embodied in changing forms that challenge us by the clarity and complexity of their emotional logic and the sheer force of their beauty.
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Poetry
ENG202
A workshop in the writing of short lyrics and the study of the art and craft of poetry.