2008–2009 Writing Courses
First-Year Studies in Fiction Writing
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
In this yearlong fiction-writing workshop, students acquaint themselves with such basic elements of fiction as point of view, character, plot and structure, dialogue, exposition, detail, and scene as well as other more sophisticated concepts related to the craft and imaginative process of fiction. Principles such as counterpoint characterization, defamiliarization, and the sublime, among others, are explored through lessons, writing exercises, and assigned readings as well as student-selected readings. We attend readings and craft talks by the guest writers in our reading series. Students form small groups to research various aspects of fiction and to make organized presentations to the class. We move on in the second semester to explore dream narratives, quest stories, and the hero’s journey; the structure of jokes; and graphic fiction. We study a group-chosen novel and film, and we bring the inspiration and edification of other arts’ processes into the mix. The core of the course is the students’ own development as fiction writers. Each student is required to write and present for workshop at least one final developed story. Students are responsible for critiquing each student story in writing as well as participating thoughtfully and actively in the workshop discussion.
First-Year Studies: The Source of Stories: Writing from Your Own Experience
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
Where do our stories come from? Do they come from what happens to us? From what we read in the newspapers? Or from what we make up in our heads? Or all the above? The novelist John Berger once said that writers draw their material from three sources: experience, witness, and imagination. The goal of this mixed-genre workshop, which will focus on the short story, personal essay, and memoir, is for the emerging writer to find and develop his or her own subject matter. Students will be asked to explore the raw material of their lives and adding the mix of witness (what we have seen or been told) and what we invent. We begin with an assignment based on Joe Brainard’s book I Remember. Students make their own lists of memories of childhood and adolescence. We will turn these lists into anecdotes and scenes and eventually into stories. Students will also begin a list called “I Imagine,” and in this assignment we will explore family lore, stories students have heard from others, or perhaps even drawing from newspaper accounts. We will look at writers who have delved into their own subject matter in both fiction and nonfiction, such as James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, Tim O’Brien, Virginia Woolf, Paul Auster, and Lorrie Moore, and discuss the various issues posed in each form. Students will be given assignments intended to evoke subject matter in both genres. For example, a piece of family lore might become a short essay or a work of fiction. Students will write short stories, essays, and memoir and learn to move freely from one genre to the next, attempting to reimagine their material in different forms. The emphasis will be on voice and narrative, both of which are essential for good fiction and nonfiction. We will also spend a good deal of time learning what it means to write a scene. This is a course for any student who wants to explore the material that will become the source of his or her stories.
First-Year Studies: As Only You Could Tell It: Studies in Fiction
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
This is a yearlong foray into the writing of prose fiction. We will begin with the landscape of childhood, the complex fictions we heard/saw and felt around us, and how as writers we leap from the “actual” to the artifice of fiction. What then is a story? How do we find the stories that we need to tell and then tell in a voice of our own making? What are the strategies of short fiction? In our year together, we will begin gathering the tools of fiction—character, scene, narration, dialogue, place, time, situation—and seeing how these gather, twist, and shape into necessary fictions. We will read and read and read more—not as students of literature but as fiction writers reading the work of other writers to understand how the story was made. Writers we will read include Paley, Chekhov, Poe, Munro, and other contemporary short story and novel writers. Students will be writing everyday, completing weekly writing assignments, working on longer stories and revisions. This course in the art of fiction will also be a course in necessity, wonder, and reverence that are, finally, what generate great writing.
First-Year Studies: The American Poetry Landscape as Shaped by Literary Journals
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
In this yearlong poetry-writing workshop, we will read from coast-to-coast of the American literary magazine landscape to determine if there is an American style and to discover what are the new American themes. We will begin at The New Yorker magazine and read all the way across the heartland through Chicago to Poetry magazine and Ohio’s Kenyon Review, out toward the wild northern west of Tin House and The Threepenny Review, and then back across the literary landscape via the South into the loving arms of Callaloo in Texas, Gulf Coast in Houston, and The Southern Review before finishing our tour, by accident and aim, at the annual Best American Poetry. Along the way we will take in many of the smaller, important journals like Jubilat and Fence as well as a few anthologies and online journals. But keep in mind that this is a writing workshop; a (twice-a-week) nuts-and-bolts operating table for your poems, criticisms, and ideas; a judicious, courageous place where we will explore the concrete and abstract spirits and limbs of our poems. There will be a class project, yes––a journal, in which students will act as campus readers and editors.
First-Year Studies in Poetry: The Song of the Soul
Level: FYS
Semester: FYS
This is a course where we will immerse ourselves in the song of the soul: the reading and writing of poetry. We will look closely at the why, the who, and the how of poems. We will learn poems by heart. We will study syntax, line, diction, image, music, etc.—a poet’s strategies and techniques. We will read poems, attend poetry readings and slams, watch films, look at art, go on field trips, read essays, and generally immerse ourselves in the soup of inspiration. We will spend time generating poems together inspired by the poets we experience and look closely at one another’s work. Each writer in our class will meet with another class member once a week in a “poetry date.” Each writer will be responsible for reading the assigned work and for bringing to class one written offering each week. Each writer will meet with me on a regular basis and create a conference project that will come to fruition at the end of the year. We will work hard, learn a great deal about poetry, and have a wonderful time.
Fiction Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Year
The aim of this course will be to make itself retroactively superfluous by helping the students to ask certain simple questions that may be difficult to answer, questions such as the following: Is this the character I wish to portray, the world to create, the truth to reveal? If the answers to these questions are “Yes,” the student ought to proceed to more craft-oriented questions that break stories into their constituent elements: Did I choose the most effective forms of description or dialogue? Did I make the best possible use of language? These questions will be asked and this critical habit encouraged through the systematic examination of one another’s stories. There will also be exercises and incidental readings of fiction and pertinent essays on the writer’s place (or misplacement) in life.
Fiction Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Year
How do we, as writers, take our lived experiences and transform them into fiction? The novelist Janet Frame observed that “putting it all down as it happens is not fiction; there must be the journey by oneself, the changing of the light focused upon the material, the willingness of the author herself to live within that light, that city of reflections governed by different laws, materials, currency.” Through exercises and longer writing assignments, we will begin the journey into this softly lit territory of subject matter. The workshop will take on questions of craft: what makes a story a story? Does there always need to be transformation within a story? What role does language play? How is structure important? Do we write what we know or what we don’t know? Class will be divided between the discussion of student stories and published authors such as Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Alice Munro. Students will do additional conference reading and be required to attend at least two campus readings in the semester. We will also work on developing our constructive criticism, which (when developed over time and in a supportive and open atmosphere) should help us better understand the workings of our own creative writing.
Words and Pictures
Level: Open
Semester: Year
This is a course with writing at its center and the other arts, mainly, but not exclusively visual, around it. It should let you see what you can put together that has been kept apart. We will read and look at all kinds of things—children’s books, mysteries, poetry, short stories, fairy tales, graphic novels, performance pieces—and think about the ways people have used writing and other arts to speak to each other. People in these classes have combined text and pictures in conference work involving cartoons, quilts, T-shirts, texts with music behind them, and so on. There will be weekly assignments that specify what emotional territory you are in, but not what you make of it. The semester course has less elaborate conference work than the yearlong course.
Open to any interested student, especially those who would like to work with more than one art.
The Writer and His Demons—In Search of Lost Time and the Invention of the Narrative of Inner Life: A Reading and Writing Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Year
The North American novelist Russell Banks once wryly observed, “Few deeds can be more heroic than an attempt to read In Search of Lost Time from beginning to end. Some persons will quarrel with this. Some will argue that true heroism lies in sitting through all of Wagner’s Die Valkyrie. Others will hold that it consists in enduring a festival of Andy Hardy films. Every man has his Everest. None is so formidable as In Search of Lost Time.” But as a modern literary writer, sooner or later you have to do it and go to the mountain and wrestle with what many have called the greatest literary accomplishment of the twentieth century. Ulysses, Lolita, Mrs. Dalloway, Absalom, Absalom! are all masterworks more often (and easily) approached in their fullness than Marcel Proust’s magnum opus; but none rival it in intensity and scope, in its sheer ability to teach us how to shape and explore the inner lives of our characters in our new century. In fact, with a little help from Freud, the authors of the above-named works, and the unavoidable Dostoevsky from the earlier century, this previously unknown, tame short-story writer and half-baked critic, who one day locked himself up in his bedroom and lined the walls with cork “to better deal with my demons,” could have very well invented the narrative of inner life for every single writer who later delved into it in the last century and early in our own. We will explore how, as well as lay the groundwork for an alternative mode of storytelling to a certain kind of North American and British naturalism—externalism, it may be called, a character more than anything an accumulation of actions and words spoken, the internal life for the large part only suggested (there are many exceptions, of course. See Jonathan Franzen’s hyper-Proustian The Corrections)—which seems to dominate contemporary literature in English and the North American workshop culture in general. We will read all seven volumes, concentrating, among many other things, on the corrective notion, as the critic Roger Shattuck puts it, that the work is less about memory and the passage of time and more a series of “stepping stones on a path that will lead beyond their uncertainty to more essential and more durable mental states.”Workshop writers will be responsible for leading craft groups and selecting individual passages to discuss in class and to inspire methods to delve into the inner lives of their characters. Each semester will end with a series of workshops of stories written and revised in conference in light of many of the issues raised by our reading.
Writing and Reading Fiction
Level: Open
Semester: Year
An eminent novelist once began a lecture by asking how many people in the audience wanted to be writers. When a majority of the people in attendance raised their hands, he said, “So why the hell aren’t you home writing?” The novelist was asking the right question. The only way to improve as a writer is to write as much as you can. You might have all the talent in the world; you might have had a thousand fascinating experiences; but talent and experience won’t get you very far unless you have the ability to sit down, day after day, and write. Accordingly, my main goal is to encourage you to develop (or sustain) the habit of steady writing. Aside from the stories that you will pre-sent to the group as a whole, I will expect you to give me additional work (although not necessarily completed work) every two weeks, work that we will talk about in conference. As for my style as a teacher, I rarely if ever speak about the “rules” of fiction, because if fiction has rules, then I do not know what they are. I do not have many fixed ideas about what constitutes a good story (except that it needs to be well written). I do not seek to impose a style or subject matter on you, but to help you explore your own style and your own subjects. If you thrive with instructors who offer clear, hard guidelines about the structure of fiction, you’d probably do best to choose another workshop. The class will meet twice a week. In the first session, we will discuss student fiction; in the second, we will discuss published fiction by writers including Chekhov, Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway, Kafka, Flannery O’Connor, and Grace Paley. We will try to read as writers, thinking carefully about what we can learn from the work of those who have gone before us.
Open to any interested student. No prior writing experience is necessary for this course, but please sign up for it only if you are willing to work very hard.
Fiction Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Year
Our imaginations grant us waking dreams, and cultivating the imagination is a large part of writing good fiction. Equally important, though, are sharpening our observations and mastering craft. In this course, we will aim for a balance of all these elements. Through reading each other’s work and thoughtfully critiquing it, we will learn about our own work. By examining the fiction of published authors, we will find solutions to technical challenges. We will pursue philosophical questions about writing as well; for instance, is there such a thing as a reliable narrator? Does what is considered realistic vary according to culture and era? What essentially defines a short story as opposed to a poem or an essay? Students will be encouraged to stick with the revision process, to let go of preconceived ideas about subject matter, and to experiment with language and form. Writing exercises will be a regular part of this course—we will use them for various purposes, from shaking off tired grammatical habits to excavating dark and dusty corners of our memories. We will read work by Anton Chekhov, Katherine Anne Porter, Joy Williams, Brian Evenson, Robert Lopez, Russell Banks, Junot Díaz, Aimee Bender, George Saunders, Yasunari Kawabata, Denis Johnson, Gary Lutz, and others.
Fictional Techniques
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Art may come from the heart, but craft comes from the brain. Taking a craft orientation, the class identifies and isolates essential technical elements of fiction writing—the merits of various points of view, the balance of narrative and dialogue, the smooth integration of flashback into narrative, the uses of long or short sentences, tenses—and then rehearses them until the writer develops facility and confidence in their use. We accomplish this by daily writing in an assigned diary. In addition to assigned writing, the writer must (or attempt to) produce forty pages of work each semester. The class reads short fiction or excerpts from longer works that illustrate the uses of these numerous techniques and pays special attention to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a toolbox of a novel that employs most of the techniques of fiction developed since its seventeenth-century beginnings. Each writer must choose and read a novel of literary or social value written by a woman, such as Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Gone with the Wind. Conducted in a noncompetitive and cooperative way, the class brainstorms a plot, and with each writer taking a chapter, composes a class novel. Finally, the class explores the proper use of a writer’s secondary tool, the copy machine in the production of a simple publication, a ’zine, extending the process of fiction writing beyond the frustrating limbo of the finished manuscript. Fictional Techniques adopts a hammer-and-nails approach to writing prose fiction, going behind the curtain to where the scenery gets painted and the levers get yanked.
Fictional Techniques
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Art may come from the heart, but craft comes from the brain. Taking a craft orientation, the class identifies and isolates essential technical elements of fiction writing—the merits of various points of view, the balance of narrative and dialogue, the smooth integration of flashback into narrative, the uses of long or short sentences, tenses—and then rehearses them until the writer develops facility and confidence in their use. We accomplish this by daily writing in an assigned diary. In addition to assigned writing, the writer must (or attempt to) produce forty pages of work each semester. The class reads short fiction or excerpts from longer works that illustrate the uses of these numerous techniques and pays special attention to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a toolbox of a novel that employs most of the techniques of fiction developed since its seventeenth-century beginnings. Each writer must choose and read a novel of literary or social value written by a woman, such as Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Gone with the Wind. Conducted in a noncompetitive and cooperative way, the class brainstorms a plot, and with each writer taking a chapter, composes a class novel. Finally, the class explores the proper use of a writer’s secondary tool, the copy machine in the production of a simple publication, a ’zine, extending the process of fiction writing beyond the frustrating limbo of the finished manuscript. Fictional Techniques adopts a hammer-and-nails approach to writing prose fiction, going behind the curtain to where the scenery gets painted and the levers get yanked.
Fiction Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Nabokov stated that there are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. We will consider all three, but it is with the art of enchantment that this workshop is most dedicated. We will walk through the process of writing a story. Where does the story come from? How do we know when we are ready to begin? How do we avoid succumbing to safe and unoriginal decisions and learn to recognize and trust our more mysterious and promising impulses? How do our characters guide the work? How do we come to know an ending, and how do we earn that ending? And finally, how do we create the enchantment necessary to involve, persuade, and move the reader in the ways that fiction is most capable? We will investigate the craft through readings and discussion and writing exercises. Our objective for the semester is to write, revise, and workshop one fully developed story.
The Writer Versus the State, the Foreign Political Novel and the North American Writer: A Craft Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
What is the essence of a political tale, and how does it fit into a workshop culture that stresses writing without an agenda? How do we define it? And do those definitions vary from culture to culture? Is there a correlation between the totalitarian ventures of any State, whether they be momentary or pervasive, and the quality and intensity of the political storytelling that arises as a response? And how does this all affect us as twenty-first-century North American writers—can our political tales matter as much as those that are forged in more politically oppressive societies? We will read three foreign political novels: Ngu_gi_wa Thiong’o’s The Wizard of the Crow, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, as well as one North American, Denis Jonson’s Tree of Smoke, to more fully delve into these questions and others, using many of the issues raised in class to inspire methods to deal with similar questions in our own writing. Writers will be responsible for leading craft group conversations and for selecting individual passages to discuss in class. Each semester will end in a series of workshops of stories written and revised in conference in light of many of the issues raised by our reading. There is no requirement for student work to be overtly political in nature. But through our reading and craft conversations, we will explore how political forces exert themselves even in the most intimate moments of a character’s life and how it may be said that storytelling is by its very nature a political act, antithetical to the forces that guide the ship of State, whether benevolent or tyrannical.
Also open to all M.F.A. graduate students.
Fiction Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Run like a graduate-level writing workshop, this course gives students a chance to submit fictional work for critique and discussion three or four times a semester. The format is simple: a handful of students bring in copies of their work each week, and the rest of the class brings the work home with them, writes up comments, and comes in ready to discuss the submitted pieces in class the following week. While I will bring in packets of contemporary stories periodically, the focus will be to learn about writing from each other’s work. Students may only write about what interests them. By this, I mean I want students to come in ready to write solely about the things that they themselves are excited, frightened, moved, and inspired by.
Fiction Workshop: Voice
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
It’s something we talk about in workshop and admire in the stories and novels we read. But how does one discover one’s voice in fiction? What does it mean to have a “strong voice” in your work, and why is that important? How is voice related to subject matter? Through questions like these, we will attempt to learn as much as we can about our own voices—on the page and as critics in the workshop. As part of our reading, we will study the voices created in several young adult novels, including The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M. T. Anderson, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, and Witness by Kate DiCamillo. We will also read adult authors such as Alison Bechdel and Tobias Wolff, whose stories present complex and edifying examples of voice, structure, and point of view. Reading assignments will be given each week; in addition to writing exercises, students will workshop stories at least twice during the semester. Please come prepared to work hard and hone the elements of craft in your own fiction.
Words and Pictures
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
The semester version of Words and Pictures has a different reading list, less complicated conference work, and more emphasis on storytelling than the year version, but its essence in the same: the combining of written or spoken text and visual or musical elements. We will explore and create folk tales, graphic novels, songs, work in fabric, short films, and so on. There will be weekly assignments that specify what emotional territory you should be in, but not what you make of it, and a conference project that is chosen by you. We welcome people with all kinds of skills: visual artists, musicians, knitters, scrapbookers, and people who just want to try things.
Fiction Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
All great stories are built with good sentences. In this workshop, students will create short stories or continue works-in-progress that will be read and discussed by their peers. Class sessions will focus on constructive criticism of the writer’s work, and students will be encouraged to ask the questions all writers grapple with—What makes a good story? Have I developed my characters fully, and does my language convey the ideas I want? We will talk about the writer’s craft in class—how people tell stories to each other, how to find a plot, and how to make a sentence come to life. This workshop should be seen as a place where students can share their thoughts and ideas in order to then return to their pages and create a completed imaginary work. There will also be some short stories and essays on the art of writing that will set the tone and provide literary fodder for the class.
Story and Sense: The Art of Memoir
Level: Open
Semester: Year
In this course, we will study a range of forms and techniques of memoir writing and how the demands of storytelling and “finding story” in what seem to be objectively compelling life experiences create interesting tensions and problems in our work. We will study fiction and nonfiction craft and the works of authors who revisit experiences and characters in both genres. How do excursions in one discipline invigorate the practice of the other, particularly with regard to challenges such as the crafting of persona; how characters live on the page; questions of subjectivity and of memory; and how we employ narrative strategy and economy? Students will draft, workshop, revise, and resubmit a semester-long memoir project alongside shorter in-class writings. We will read widely in fiction, memoir, and the pedagogy of creative writing and critically examine those readings alongside student work.
Oral History and Creative Nonfiction
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Oral history reminds us that people are natural storytellers. The oral history interview also gives writers unusual access—to the past; to stories they may not have heard otherwise or that otherwise might never be told; to the liveliness of speech; to small worlds within our larger world. The oral history interview also poses a particular—and particularly interesting—challenge to writers: What do we do with multiple perspectives on a single event? How do we confront the mystery of what, if anything, actually happened? Students will learn basic techniques of oral history interviewing and will be responsible for conducting two oral history interviews. Although this is primarily a writing workshop in which work will be discussed, we will also go on several field trips in order to conduct interviews locally. Students will be responsible for completing one writing project. We will also look at the oral roots of literature and the persistent influence of the oral tradition on contemporary literature. Readings will include Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, Joseph Mitchell, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Alessandro Portelli, Elias Canetti, Flora Nwapa, Joan Nestle, and Allan Gurganus.
Nonfiction Laboratory
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
This course is for students who want to break free of the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover the full range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss examples of formally innovative nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces, which they will have written in consultation with the instructor as a part of their conference work. Among the texts that will be discussed in class are Nathalie Sarraute’s memoir in two voices, Childhood; Susan Griffin’s double narrative, “Red Shoes”; George W. S. Trow’s dazzling exploration of the effects of television on political culture, Within the Context of No Context; Natalia Ginzburg’s disarmingly straightforward portrait of her marriage, “He and I”; Simone Weil’s epigraphic philosophical meditation, Gravity and Grace; David Shields’s oddly moving “Life Story,” composed entirely of bumper sticker slogans; and “list essays” by Carole Maso and Eliot Weinberger.
Creative Nonfiction Writing
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Good creative nonfiction is fully imagined, infused with the writer’s own unique vision and voice; it works to enlighten the reader on both an intellectual and an emotional level. In this course we will generate new work, both inside and outside the classroom, using exercises to promote fast writing, to explore ideas, and to experiment with style. In addition to reading and analyzing the works of published writers, we will read and consider the works of class members with the goal of encouraging and inspiring each other to create works of art.
A Question of Character: The Art of the Profile
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
Any writer who tries to capture the likeness of another—whether in biography, history, journalism, or art criticism—must face certain questions. What makes a good profile? What is the power dynamic between subject and writer? How does a subject’s place in the world determine the parameters of what may be written about him or her? To what extent is any portrait also a self-portrait? And how can the complexities of a personality be captured in several thousand—or even several hundred—words? In this course, we will tackle the various challenges of profile writing, such as choosing a good subject, interviewing, plotting, obtaining and telescoping biographical information, and defining the role of place in the portrait. Students will be expected to share their own work, identify in other writers’ characterizations what they admire or despise, and learn to read closely many masters of the genre: Joseph Mitchell, Tom Wolfe, Janet Malcolm. We will also turn to shorter forms of writing—personal sketches, obituaries, brief reported pieces, fictional descriptions—to further illuminate what we mean when we talk about “identity” and “character.” The goal of this course is less to teach the art of profile writing than to make us all more alert to the subtleties of the form.
Writing in the First Person—Craft of the Personal Essay
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
All good writing requires an understanding of form, an ability to observe closely, and careful attention to the subtleties and power of language. But personal essays pose special challenges: Is it possible to write about your own experience and remain objective? How do you describe emotions without melodrama? What parts of your life do you choose to frame? How can you be character and writer at once? In this workshop course, we will explore writing in the first person, examining our own writing and that of others, including Robert Benchley, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Natalia Ginzburg, Ian Frazier, Annie Dillard, M. F. K. Fisher, James Baldwin, Jonathan Franzen, Cynthia Ozick, Joan Didion, E. B. White, Tom Wolfe, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and David Sedaris. We will look at technical aspects of the manuscript, including syntax and sentence structure, as well as such global issues as momentum, humor, metaphor, and authenticity. There will be brief weekly assignments that we will read aloud and some in-class writing exercises, as well as a longer conference paper.
Poetry and the Graphic Novel
Level: Open
Semester: Year
“It looks as if the Creator, whose ethical motives people have learned to doubt, was prompted primarily by his desire to make everything as interesting as possible, and as comic.”
—Czeslaw Milosz
In this course, we will mine the intersections between the graphic novel/comics and the poem, using the lens of Scott McCloud’s two critical texts on the graphic novel—Understanding Comics and Making Comics. On alternate weeks, we will read books of poetry or graphic novels, which will be discussed in class. Books of poetry will include Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler, The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg, Indeed I Was Pleased with the World by Mary Ruefle, Siste Viator by Sarah Manguso, Crush by Richard Siken, Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland, and Borderless Bodies by Linh Dinh, among others. Graphic novels will include The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman, Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi, The Book of Leviathan by Peter Blegvad, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Ghost World by Daniel Clowes, Sleepwalk and Other Stories by Adrian Tomine, and Tales of Woodsman Pete by Lilli Carré. Students will write approximately one poem per week and will, on alternating weeks, translate their work into graphic pieces, along the lines of the Poetry Foundation’s “The Poem as Comic Strip.”
Masks and Personas: A Poetry Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Year
In this writing workshop, we will read a number of books by writers who utilize masks and personas to explore depths of honesty, thought, and feeling that might otherwise be off-limits (such as John Berryman’s Henry, Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, and the expansive I in Whitman’s Song of Myself), all of which complicate the notion of the unified first person. We will consider the different ways a character may be created and inhabited via syntax, diction, emotional crescendos and deflations, associative leaps, metaphors, and tonal shifts. We will also read books by poets who use a more literal I, including Terrance Hayes, Rilke, W. S. Merwin, and Paisley Rekdal, considering the similarities and differences between the poem uttered in the voice of a character and the more directly spoken poem, hopefully coming to a richer understanding of the possibilities of the first person. Students will be asked to create their own mask, a constructed first person to breathe and speak through, and also to write poems in the mind/ throat/heart of a more literal I. The reading will be roughly a book of poetry a week, and there will be a number of short response essays. Students will be expected to write and rewrite with passion and vigor, turning in a new first draft each week and a final manuscript (or chapbook) at the end of the year. Forty percent of each class will be spent discussing the reading. The other sixty percent will be devoted to student work. This course will be good for workshop veterans as well as those who have been harboring an urge to give poetry a try.
The Making of the Complete Lover: A Poetry Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
“The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest poet.”
—Walt Whitman
This course will be a yearlong variation on the theme of the traditional poetry workshop, focused on acquiring the ways and means of Whitman’s complete lover, via the study of great poetry. En route, we will read aloud, discuss particular topics (e.g., line breaks, truth, the blues), and do various tuning and strengthening exercises, with brief forays into the in-class workshop. Conference time will be devoted to student work. Students will also be asked to compile one anthology and two collections of their own poetry for class distribution, one each term; to memorize; to participate in four class readings over the course of the year; and to do a collaborative presentation on a poet of their choice. The only prerequisites are a curiosity about all poetry, not just one’s own, and a commitment to undertake whatever labors are necessary to write better on the last day of class than on the first.
Smashing the Ritual Parlor: Poetry Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Part poetry workshop and part reading discussion, we will explore how we can take “risks” in poetry rather than follow prescriptive techniques. Using the avant-garde tradition as our model, we will experiment with poetic process, form, and expressions of self. We will dig into alternative generative practices by finding inspiration from film, art, readings, collaborations, and chance exercises. Furthermore, this course will question what “voice” is in a poem, by writing from multiple perspectives and inventing our own personas. Our workshop will also focus on how diverse poetic forms can tease, energize, and retrigger our imagination by writing serial poems, prose poems, cross-genre poems, poems inspired by nonliterary forms, and our own invented forms. To oil our imaginative rig and to hone our critical understanding of poetics, we will read Gertrude Stein, Fernando Pessoa, Anne Carson, Michael Palmer, John Ashbery, Olena Kalytiak Davis, and Raymond Queaneau as well as a few essays on poetics. Expect to write a poem or more a week, along with weekly reading assignments. A portfolio will be required at the end of the semester.
The Distinctive Poetic Voice
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
Contemporary poets face a dazzling range of stylistic options. This course is designed to help you develop not just your own ear and voice, but your own sense of craft, intuition, technique, and experiment. We will focus primarily and profoundly humanistically on students’ own work, with the knowledge that a mistake in art can be fascinating, and the demonstration of competence can be irrelevant. We will also look at poets from Anne Carson to Elizabeth Bishop to Basho_; students will be encouraged to orient themselves and find their own directions in the labyrinth of modern poetic practice. We will look at prosody and structures from haiku and the ghazal to the sonnet, but the emphasis will be on students’ own creative projects. Expect to write every week, read voraciously, and create a portfolio of six to twelve poems.
Poetry Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
In this poetry workshop, we will read poems from published poets all the while focusing on a particular device or form: line, stanza, form, image, rhythm, music, lyric, genre, elliptical, etc. The first twenty-five percent of class time will be spent discussing these published works. Each week, students will read from a selection (reader made by instructor) and come to class prepared to discuss this work. These readings and discussions will serve as a catalyst for discussing students’ work. The remaining seventy-five percent of class time will be devoted to discussing each student’s work in detail. Each week students will be responsible for reading the assigned work and for bringing in one new poem to be workshopped.
Stranger’s Song: Poetry Workshop
Level: Open
Semester: Spring
From Dante to Eliot, some of the greatest works have been written by poets in exile. In this course, we will explore—via our own poems, reading, and workshop discussion—the condition of exile. Emphasis will be placed on reading across cultures and disciplines, from poets like Paul Celan, Joseph Brodsky, Tomaz Salamun, Bei Dao, Harryette Mullen, and Charles Simic, to memoirist W. G. Sebald, filmmaker Chris Marker, and theorists like Walter Benjamin. We will discuss how these writers and artists challenge and broaden poetic language, identity, and consciousness. Using their work as a generative springboard, we will write poems that focus on the vibrant contradictions of our own identity and voice and explore music through sound collage and homophonic translations, among other approaches. We will also consider the complexities of the political poem, or poetry of witness, and write our own. Expect to write a poem or more a week, along with weekly reading assignments. Emphasis will be placed on revelatory process rather than polished product.