English 43B

Other Readings and Media

Course Reader. 

Books may include a few of the following:  Brandon Brown, Top Forty (2014); Cody-Rose Clevidence, Beast Feast (2014); CA Conrad, ECODEVIANCE (2014); Graham Foust, Time Down to Mind (2015); Rob Halpern [---------]: Placeholder (2015); Elaine Kahn, Women in Public (2015); Douglas Kearney, Mess and Mess (2015); Trisha Low, The Compleat Purge (2013); Fred Moten, The Feel Trio (2014); Nathanaël, The Middle Notebooks (2015); Sara Nicholson, What the Lyric Is (2016); Morgan Parker, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night (2015); Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014); Solmaz Sharif, Look (2016); Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016); Simone White, Of Being Dispersed (2016).

Description

This course is primarily a poetry workshop.  Reading and writing assignments will help generate our workshop material and give us the language and tools to treat that material.  Readings will include poetry and poetics from the last several hundred years as well as a handful of single volume works by contemporary poets.  Writing assignments will engage both vision and process: they will inflate and anchor us.  We will practice working within established forms and we will practice destabilizing form.  We will work to understand the work we study and produce within its cultural, historical, political, and aesthetic contexts.   In addition to writing poems, students will be required to do some critical writing, comment on other students’ work, attend poetry readings, and memorize and recite other writers’ poems.  At the semester’s end students will revise their work, produce chapbooks, and organize a reading.

Only continuing UC Berkeley students are eligible to apply for this course.  To be considered for admission, please electronically submit 5 of your poems, by clicking on the link below; fill out the application you'll find there and attach the writing sample as a Word doucment or .rtf file. The deadline for completing this application process is 11 P.M., THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27.

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.