English 204
craft of poetry: TWO PLUS ONE
I am thinking of this course as a two content areas plus one form. We will be reading for range in this class. And my goal is to convey an expansive sense of what is possible in contemporary poetry. For the first third of the semester we will read a large number of writers who are wrestling with the representational issues that accompany writing about the current on going wars in which the US currently participates. The list here is likely to include but will not in any way be limited to Amiri Baraka, Judith Butler, Alice Notley, Judith Goldman, Brenda Hillman, etc. For the second third we will read a large number of writers who are doing things to the body in their work so as to disengage with the tendency of lyric to naturalize heterosexuality and/or figure women as desired and men as desiring. The list here is likely to include but will not in any way be limited to Kathy Acker, Dodie Bellamy, Tisa Bryant, Hiromi Ito, Nourbese Philips, Vanessa Place, and William Pope L. For the last third, we will look at the form of the “tour.” The list here is likely to include but will not in any way be limited to David Buuck, Gaye Chan, CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock, Deep Oakland, Jena Osman, various Situationist tracts, Spurse, Claudia Rankine, and Kaia Sand. For each area of concern, you will turn in critical and creative enactments/assignments/annotations. There will be a lot of reading for this class. All of it will be good and much of it might even change your (writing) life.
August 25
introduction
September 1
Joan Retallack, “Rethinking Poetics Log”
Paul Chan, Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, The Law, and Poetry (2006)
first module: the MILITARY
argument: In the last five years an unusually large amount of poets have written on the same topic: US military expansionism. We will begin this class by looking at a number of these works and cataloguing the various formal techniques that these writers use.
read one of the following…
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence or Frames of War
plus a selection from these…
Alice Notley, Alma or the Dead Women [MBS]
Amiri Baraka, Somebody Blew up America [SPD]
Barrett Watten, Bad History [SPD]
Brenda Hillman, Pieces of Air in the Epic [MBS]
Carole Mirakove, Occupied [SPD]
Dan Bouchard, Some Mountains Removed [SPD]
David Buuck, Shunt [SPD]
Eliot Weinberg, “What I Heard about Iraq” [OR]
Heriberto Yepez, Wars. Threesomes. Drafts and Mothers. [SPD]
Judith Goldman, Deathstar/Rico-chet [SPD]
Jules Boykoff, Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge [SPD]
Jena Osman, An Essay in Astericks [SPD]
K. Silem Mohammad, Deer Head Nation [SPD]
Kim Rosenfeld, Trama [SPD]
Kristin Prevallet, Shadow Evidence Intelligence [SPD]
Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs [SPD]
Meg Hamill, Death Notices [SPD]
Drew Gardener, Petroleum Hat [SPD]
Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard [MBS]
September 8
Bring copies for the entire class. Questions about a work (or works) you read. This question should be at least a full paragraph in length. It might even be a page. Questions though should be “meaty,” should be designed to provoke discussion. They might also be somewhat “craft” based. A sort of example of what I am talking about could be seen in these questions about Drew Gardner’s “Chicks Dig War” at this website: http://www.marscafe.com/write-now. Bonus points if your question mentions some of the ideas in Butler.
September 15
Bring in some creative work that somehow engages with some of the issues we discussed. Bring copies for the entire class. Should be a somewhat serious piece of work that could be published on its own. I am hesitant to put a page number on something like this but it should be more than something that you dashed off at midnight the night before but less than a book length project. Somewhere between two and thirty pages.
September 22
Bring copies for the entire class (but we may or may not discuss in class; I’m not sure yet). Bring in an annotated bibliography of the 4-6 books you read for this module. Try to make this bibliography investigatory. So instead of any 4-6 books, focus your bibliography around a technique, a device, an issue. Example: A bibliography about sarcasm that discusses Gardner, Mohammad, Mikhail, and Buuck and also discusses how or why they are using it. I’ve made these annotated bibliographies due at the end rather than the beginning of the module so you can adjust your reading based on the presentations from the first week. I’d prefer it if you concentrate on books on the class list, but if you really want to add some other books then check in with me and we can discuss.
second module: DEMATERIALIZED BODIES AND STRATEGIC SEXUALITIES IN REACTION TO THE INDIVIDUALIST TENDENCY OF POETRY
argument: Poetry has an intense and long tradition of an inward turn. This module looks at some recent works that attempt to take this inward turn (often we call this inward turn “lyric” or “love poetry”) and turn it outside in or inside out. The not so hidden agenda behind this list is feminism, provocative feminisms in particular. And the list could also be seen as a series of examples of some recent dis-engagements with the long tradition of lyric that has naturalized heterosexuality and/or has figured women as muse and objects of desire and men as desiring agents.
read…
Judith Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies”
plus a selection from these…
Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School [MBS]
Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker [MBS]
Asa Berg, Remainland [SPD]
Tisa Bryant, Unexplained Presence [SPD]
Margaret Christakos, Excessive Love Prosthesis [SPD]
Samuel Delany, Times Square Red Times Square Blue [SPD]
Renee Gladman, Toaf [SPD]
ed. Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg, Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poets [SPD]
Kenneth Goldsmith, Fidget [SPD]
Hiromi Ito, Killing Kanoko [SPD]
Jennifer Martenson, Unsound [SPD]
Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day [MBS]
Nathanaël (Nathalie Stephens), Absence where as: Claude Cahun and the unopened book [SPD]
Alice Notley, Descent of Alette [MBS]
Nourbese Philip, Zong! [MBS]
Vanessa Place, Statement of Fact, [order]
William Pope L. The Friendliest Black Artist in America [MBS]
Claudia Rankin, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely [MBS]
Trish Saleh, Wanting in Arabic [SPD]
Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution [MBS]
Catherine Wagner, My New Job [SPD]
Hannah Weiner, Open House [SPD]
Ronaldo Wilson, Poems of the Black Object [SPD]
Heriberto Yepez, Wars. Threesomes. Drafts and Mothers. [SPD]
September 29
Bring copies for the entire class. What parts of bodies? Take a book or two and index all the body parts in it. Then write something up about what sort of body the book creates. If it makes more sense, you could do this around which sexualities or how sexuality gets represented. Basically, I want some indexing and then I want some analysis of what you find.
October 6
Again, bring some creative work. Again, bring copies for the entire class. Again, should be something engaged, risky, provocative, interesting. Again, three to thirty pages.
October 13
Bring copies for the entire class (but we may or may not discuss in class; I’m not sure yet) of an annotated bibliography of the 4-6 books you read for this module.
third module: the TOUR
argument: Not much of an argument here. Just that there has been in recent years a lot of interest in the tour as a way of talking about the complexities of urban space. Last year I taught a workshop at the U of Alabama that I called “Together: We Can Write a Book about Tuscaloosa.” And so after we have read and discussed some of the works below, I want to do a version of that workshop except one that I might now call “Together: We Can Write a Book about Oakland.”
read…
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees (might make sense to concentrate on “Maps.”)
plus a selection from these…
Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior [can get anywhere]
Bureau of Public Secrets--see especially key works like Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive” or Chtcheglov’s “Formulary for a New Urbanism”
David Buuck, Buried Treasure Island
Allison Cobb, Green-Wood [SPD]
CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock, The City: Real and Imagined [SPD]
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch, Ten Walks/Two Talks [SPD]
Deep Oakland
CS Giscombe: Giscome Road [MBS]
Historic Waikiki
Fiamma Montezemolo, Rene Peralta, and Heriberto Yepez, Here Is Tijuana! [MBS]
Jena Osman, “Public Figures”
Kristin Palm, The Straits [SPD]
Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and 7 Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture [in reprint; should be out by October]
Kaia Sand, Remember to Wave [SPD]
Jane Sprague, Port of Los Angeles [SPD]
Spurse, “Investigations in place: Some thoughts on Psychogeographic mapping strategies in an examination of the working coasts of Maine”
October 20
Bring copies for the entire class. Choose a book or two and somehow make a map of the tour and at the same time somehow demonstrate what is represented in the tour and what is not represented that could be. Bonus points for making it clear you’ve read the Moretti.
October 27, November 3, November 10
"Together"
November 17
Bring copies for the entire class (but we may or may not discuss in class; I’m not sure yet) of an annotated bibliography of the 4-6 books you read for this module.
December 1
Again, bring some creative work. Again, bring copies for the entire class. Again, should be something engaged, risky, provocative, interesting. Again, three to thirty pages.
