English 143B

Book List

Blanchfield, Brian: A Several World; Hamilton, Peggy: Questions for Animals; Holiday, Harmony: Go Find Your Father; Saloy, Mona Lisa: Second Line Home

Other Readings and Media

A course reader to be available from Zee Zee Copy.

Description

What I take as a given is that poetry (and by implication, all "creative writing") is a public activity, one with the job of disrupting the status quo, the "interested" discourse of TV and advertising, the endless double-talk of politics. This semester I'm wanting us to emphasize poetry as a public site, as an event that necessarily takes place in public. We do shape poetry for our own purposes--some of these are classic (advancing art, e.g., or doing violence to language) and some are tawdry (use your imagination) and many fall inbetween--and I'm asking that this fall, as part of the work of this course, we work toward one or two public (open to the public) events involving poetry.

Reading, weekly writing expectations, interrogation, argument, field trips, public events, "workshopping," "woodshedding," etc.

From an essay:  I find [form] interesting as a site, as a point of disembarkation for talking about that other stuff, for the ongoing work of investigation and experiment. Sonnets can be navigated but the point, in all my classes, is not to get it right but to see how it feels to get involved in it, that and to look at what the poem (or the essay or joke or speech) does and at the ways the world presses on it, and at how it presses back on the world . . . . The point here being that both [Gwendolyn] Brooks and [Bernadette] Mayer tangle awkwardly and repeatedly with the [sonnet] form, with the received pattern of lines and syllables and turns, the daily order of arrival. Of course it's the wrestling that's important, the labor there, not the form so much. The form allows us to talk in class about the wrestling; it's a thing, a topic, a place or place-holder in the never-ending conversation.

Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course. To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5 pages of your poems (any combination of long or short poems or fragments of poems, the total length not exceeding five pages), by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word document or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 4 P.M., FRIDAY, APRIL 18.

Also be sure to read the paragraph concerning creative writing courses on page 1 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for further information regarding enrollment in such courses.