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HUMS 620 Entering the Territory of the Poem: A Poetry Writing Workshop Course dates:
First Week: Monday-Thursday, June 23-June 26; 06:00 PM - 09:00 PM Public Affairs Center 104 This workshop examines a selection of poems from the ancient to the contemporary, noticing differences in the way they work. We will explore a number of approaches and practices for working with poems as a reader and a writer. The aim is to enter the territory of the poem in a way that is active, contemplative, and evocative. We'll ask questions such as What is poetry? What are the basic elements of a poem? And What is the technical vocabulary necessary to the critique of a poem? We'll read poems by Sappho, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, Susan Howe, Lorine Niedecker, Bernadette Mayer, Robert Hayden, Mark McMorris, and others. We'll write poems in response to the work that we read. Required Books: Bernadette Mayer's Indigo Bunting, Lorine Niedecker's The Granite Pail, and Mark McMorris's The Cafe at Light Suggested Reading: The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, edited by poet Ron Padgett or Lewis Turco's Book of Poetic Forms. Grades will be based on attendance, class participation, a journal with brief daily critical responses to the work, and a final portfolio of writing (both short analytic pieces and creative work). Rough calendar and links to reading material: Week One: Focus on Lorine Niedecker's work
Monday June 23: Introductions and question: What is Poetry? Homework: look at and print these vowel and consonant pronunciation charts: Consonants
Tuesday 24: Basic Elements: sounds in poetry. letters, vowels, consonants, and phonemes.
Wednesday 25: Studies of syllables:
Thursday 26: Line Breaks and Internal Mechanics of the Poem:
"Projectively" (Olson, Howe, Weiner) Listen to Robert Creeley's "Zero" and decide where the line breaks are based on his reading of the work. Compare your version to his.
Read
Joe Brainard’s Painting “Bingo”
Week Two: Focus on Bernadette Mayer's Indigo Bunting Monday 30: Techniques for Understanding: Performing the poem:
Connoisseur of Chaos Writing: First thoughts on the poem. Make a two-column list: abstract/philosophical ideas in the poem and concrete/particulars in the poem. Create a play using the abstractions as the plot/theme and the particulars as the set. Process writing: Second thoughts on the Wallace Stevens poem: how did your ideas about the poem change through the activity of performing it?
Tuesday July 1: Form and meter: George Herbert's iambs and Clark Coolidge's dactyls Wednesday 2: Words and Images: using the OED to research etymologies of words. Look at O'Hara's "Why I Am Not A Painter", Hayden's "A Plague of Starlings", James Schuyler's "February" Mindfulness exercise: walking and observing, remembering and writing. Thursday 3: Quiz on meter, discussion of Emily Dickinson, workshopping of student poems
Week Three: Focus on Mark McMorris's work Monday 7: Review Ponge writing assignment: the particulars of one object. In-class writing: words and definitions, in the manner of McMorris McMorris and Modernism: look at James Joyce "Molly's Soliloquy" and T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" Exercise: stream of consciousness writing capturing a person's mindset, and overheard conversations: bringing the world into the poem. Homework: Compare McMorris to Rimbaud's A Season in Hell. (Poem as journey through memory.) Tuesday 8: Mapping Exercise: Neighborhood Map with the Particulars of Time and Place Writing Exercise: "I Remember" Wednesday 9:Collage Texts/Bringing in History: Charles Reznikoff, and Juliana Spahr Charles Reznikoff-- from Testimony Link to Juliana Spahr's Response: Response PDF file
Thursday 10: Texts in conversation with other texts: Rosmarie Waldrop and Wittgenstein. Conclusions John Ashbery "What is Poetry?" Discussion of bibliography of further reading Review of Portfolios Essential Links:
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