KRAFT OF FOETRY, version fall 2014
Last year when
we revised the craft curriculum, we designed a two semester craft sequence for
first year students. The first semester is to be an introduction to the wide
range of aesthetics and concerns that define the genre of poetry in the
twentieth century so as to gift you with a fluency in the complicated ecosystem
that is contemporary literature. With that in mind, this class will serve as an
introduction to the genre. Out of this, we will discuss how literary forms are
formed in response to and/or in dialogue with various socio-economic forces,
how they atrophy and how we recognize this, and then how they mutate. This is,
however, not a survey course. It will be more idiosyncratic than that. This
course is required for all first year graduate students; students who are not
entering the program can enroll in it on a space available basis.
August 27
introduction
September 3
One on one meetings. We will establish an individualized reading list of at
least 5 books at this meeting.
September 10
Homer, “Book 18: the Shield of Achilles,” the Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles
and the Fagles introduction
If Not Winter:
Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
Page duBois, “Fragmentary Introduction,” Sappho is Burning
optional: Simone Weil, the
Iliad or the Poem of Force, translated by Mary McCarthy
September 17
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Masque of Anarchy” and “A Defence of Poetry”
Michael Demson, Masks
of Anarchy: The Story of a Radical Poem, from Percy Shelley to the Triangle
Factory Fire
September 24
Kristin Ross, The
emergence of social space: [Rimbaud and the Paris Commune]
especially “Introduction” and “The Transformation of Social Space”
Rimbaud, A Season in
Hell
October 1
Selections of work by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert
Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell in the Norton
Anthology of Poetry
Angie Maxwell, “The Writer as Southerner,” Indicted South: Public Criticism, Southern
Inferiority, and the Politics of Whiteness
October 8
Bertolt Brecht, “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties”
Gertrude Stein, Tender
Buttons
Virginia Wolf, Mr
Bennett and Mrs Brown
October 15
Aimé Césaire, Notebook
of a Return to My Native Land
Aimé Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge”
Introduction to Refusal
of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, by Michael
Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski
October 22
William J Harris, introduction to The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader
Baraka, “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS,” “Black Art,” “Short Speech
to My Friends,” “Am/Track"
Fred Moten, “Tragedy, Elegy” and “The Dark Lady and the
Sexual Cut,” In the Break: the Aesthetics
of the Black Radical Tradition
Documents from the Black Arts Movement, www.english.illinois.edu/maps/blackarts/documents.htm
October 29
Susan Howe, My Emily
Dickinson
Hejinian, My Life
November 5
Chad Harbach, “MFA vs. NYC”
Mark McGurl, “Introduction: Hall of Mirrors”
November 12, 19, and December 3
One on one meetings. Portfolio due a week before
your meeting. 
