CRW3310 Poetry Writing is the workshop course in which a student stops writing poems privately and starts making them under scrutiny — reading widely, drafting constantly, and learning to revise on the evidence of how a poem actually lands on readers.
The course is offered at approximately four Florida institutions: the University of Central Florida, the University of Florida, the University of North Florida and the University of West Florida.
The University of West Florida places it in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of English at 3 semester hours, describing a "workshop in writing poetry" with "practice in traditional forms and extensive work in contemporary free verse." ⚠ It is repeatable for up to 6 semester hours, which is normal for workshop courses and worth knowing — a serious student usually takes it twice. The University of Florida carries it as Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing.
⚠⚠ Florida State University uses CRW3310 for fiction, not poetry. FSU's CRW3310 is "practice in short story, novella, or novel," and its poetry course is CRW3311 "Poetic Technique." This is a different genre, not a variant. Details are in Special Information; if FSU is on your route in either direction, read that section before you enrol.
UWF's description names the two halves that define the course, and the balance between them is the main thing that varies between institutions and instructors. Traditional forms — sonnet, villanelle, sestina, pantoum, ghazal, blank verse — are taught not as antiquarianism but as constraint. A form is a set of rules that forces choices a poet would not otherwise make, and it is one of the more reliable ways to get past habitual moves. Free verse is where the majority of contemporary poetry lives, and the course's harder lesson is that free verse is not the absence of form: line break, rhythm, syntax and white space are doing structural work, and doing it deliberately is the difference between free verse and prose with the return key pressed.
The workshop is the method, and it is unlike anything else in an undergraduate degree. Students submit poems, the class reads them in advance, and the group discusses them with the writer present. ⚠ In the traditional model the writer stays silent while their poem is discussed — which is deliberate, and uncomfortable the first time. The reasoning is sound: you will not be in the room to explain the poem to its eventual readers, so the useful information is what the poem does without your help.
⚠ Workshop practice has been actively reconsidered in the last decade, and many programmes have modified the silent model — allowing the writer to pose questions, asking readers to describe before evaluating, or attending explicitly to how workshop dynamics bear on writers whose material or background differs from the group's. Both the traditional and the revised models are in use in Florida. Expect your instructor to explain the specific protocol; it is worth attending to, because how a workshop is run substantially determines how useful it is.
The reading is not optional and students consistently underestimate it. A poetry workshop assigns a great deal of contemporary poetry, and the reason is practical rather than cultural: you cannot develop a range of moves you have never seen made. Students who read narrowly write narrowly, and it is visible in the work. The single most reliable predictor of improvement in this course is how much poetry the student reads outside the assignments.
What the course is honestly for. Very few people earn a living writing poetry, and a course that pretended otherwise would be doing its students a disservice. What it reliably produces is different and genuinely valuable: a much closer attention to how language works — compression, rhythm, connotation, the weight of a single word choice — which transfers to any writing at all, and a tolerance for having your work criticised and improving it, which transfers to most professional work.
⚠ An honest framing, because this course deserves one. Almost nobody earns a living writing poetry, and any guide implying otherwise would be misleading. That is not an argument against taking it — it is an argument for being clear about what it gives you, which is real: a level of attention to language that transfers to every kind of writing, and practised resilience under criticism.
| Institution | CRW3310 | Poetry is… |
|---|---|---|
| Statewide (SCNS) | Poetry Writing | this number |
| UWF | Poetry Writing — traditional forms and contemporary free verse | this number |
| UF | Advanced Seminar in Poetry Writing | this number |
| FSU | Fiction — "short story, novella, or novel" | CRW3311 Poetic Technique |
Poetry and fiction are different genres, not variants of one subject. They involve different craft, different reading, different workshop conventions and different professional paths. A student who has taken a fiction workshop has not taken a poetry workshop in any meaningful sense.
⚠ The majority reading is poetry — the statewide title, UWF and UF all agree, and FSU is not among the institutions the statewide inventory records for this number. But FSU is a major destination for creative writing students in Florida, including for its MFA, so the divergence is likely to be met in practice.
What to do:
CRW3311, and CRW4320 is its poetry workshop above that.UWF's CRW3310 may be repeated for up to 6 semester hours, and FSU's equivalent for up to nine. This is normal for workshops and it is not a technicality:
UWF lists no prerequisite. Practice varies: some institutions require an introductory creative writing course (CRW2000 or CRW2001), and some require a writing sample or portfolio for admission to the workshop. ⚠ Check for a portfolio requirement early — where one exists it has its own deadline, usually well before registration.
⚠ "No prerequisite" is not "no useful preparation." The genuinely useful preparation is having read a lot of poetry, and there is no substitute for it. An introductory creative writing course helps with workshop conventions; a course in poetry as literature helps with vocabulary. But the student who arrives having read two hundred contemporary poems will get more from this course than one who arrives having read the assigned anthology only, and the difference shows in the first workshop.
The course sits in the sophomore through senior years, is a requirement in creative writing concentrations, and is a popular elective for English, education and general students. It normally precedes an advanced poetry workshop (CRW4320 or equivalent).
3 credits, 45 contact hours — workshop format, three hours per week, frequently in a single longer block, and normally capped at a small enrolment because the format requires it.
Expect 6–9 hours per week outside class, distributed unusually: writing, revision, substantial assigned reading, and preparing written comments on classmates' poems — the last is graded and takes longer than students expect if done properly.
⚠ Attendance matters more than in almost any other course. A workshop is a small group discussing work in a fixed sequence; an absence means a classmate's poem gets less attention and yours may lose its slot. Most workshop syllabi have strict attendance policies for exactly this reason.
Assessment is usually a final portfolio of revised poems plus a critical reflection, workshop participation, response papers on the reading, and completion of drafting exercises. ⚠ Grades in a workshop are for engagement and development, not for talent. This is standard and worth understanding: instructors grade whether you drafted, revised seriously, read carefully and contributed usefully — not whether your poems are good. A student who takes risks and fails interestingly generally scores above one who submits safe, polished, unchanged work.
CRW3310 is a 3000-level upper-division course, not generally offered at Florida College System institutions, and normally taken after transfer.
The number articulates through SCNS across the institutions that carry it — subject to the FSU genre divergence above, which is exactly the case where articulation succeeding is the problem rather than the solution.
⚠ Related numbers. CRW2000/CRW2001 (introduction to creative writing), CRW3110 (fiction at many institutions), CRW3311 (poetic technique at FSU), CRW3410/CRW3424 (playwriting), CRW4211 (creative nonfiction), CRW4320 (advanced poetry workshop). Genres are not interchangeable for requirement purposes, and a creative writing concentration normally specifies which genres and how many hours in each.
⚠ This is the course in this repository where the honest answer about AI is most nearly "don't," and it is worth explaining why rather than simply asserting it.
The output problem. Language models generate poems fluently and they are recognisably bad in a consistent way — they produce the average of the poetry in their training data. That means predictable images, resolved endings, safe abstraction, and the rhythms of the most-anthologised work of the last century. Contemporary poetry is largely valued for the opposite qualities — surprise, specificity, risk, unresolved tension — so the machine is optimising for exactly what the workshop is trying to train out of you. Instructors identify it immediately, and not by using detection software: the tell is that the poem has no particular reason to exist.
The deeper problem is that the poem is not the point. Nobody needs your poem. The course's product is you — a person who notices language more precisely and can revise their own work honestly — and the only way that happens is by drafting badly, being told, and drafting again. A generated poem produces no such change. It also makes the workshop useless: the class spends an hour giving careful feedback on something you did not write and cannot revise, which wastes their time as well as yours.
Where the tools are legitimately useful in this course:
Academic integrity. Read the syllabus. ⚠ Creative writing programmes tend to have the strictest AI policies in the university, and many prohibit generated text in submitted work outright. Submitting a generated poem as your own violates every Florida institution's policy — and in a workshop it is closer to submitting someone else's poem than to ordinary plagiarism, because the work being assessed is the writing itself rather than knowledge about a subject.
Worth knowing as a professional matter: literary magazines have been substantially disrupted by volumes of AI-generated submissions, and most now explicitly prohibit them — some have closed to unsolicited submissions entirely as a result. Submitting generated work to a journal is a straightforward way to be permanently blacklisted by editors in a small field where reputations are durable.
Generated September 7, 2026 · Updated September 7, 2026