English 143B

Book List

Coultas, Brenda: The Marvelous Bones of Time; Field, Thalia: Bird-Lover’s Backyard; Rankine, Claudia: Citizen

Other Readings and Media

Course Reader

Description

What I take as a given is that poetry 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.

Overlapping with the above concern is my thought that the project of poetry can tangle interestingly with discourses beyond the expected literary ones.  The reading assignments and prompts over the course of the semester will speak to this.  I’ll be asking students to incorporate materials from other areas—areas, disciplines, investigations of their choosing—into the writing during the fall semester; I’ll be asking students to do work toward final projects that incorporate materials from these fields of knowledge.

We’ll read three recent books that touch the thought mentioned above—Brenda Coultas’s The Marvelous Bones of Time, Thalia Field’s Bird-Lover’s Backyard, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.  There will also be a course-reader from Zee-Zee Copy.

Reading, weekly writing expectations, interrogation, argument, field trips, public events, "workshopping," "woodshedding," etc.  Students will be responsible for leading discussions on the work of the various assigned texts.

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 17.

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.