English 143B

Description

There’ll be writing prompts and there’ll be experiments involving old forms—the sonnet, the ghazal, the haibun, varieties of orature (including song). 

Old forms?  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.

Reading, weekly writing expectations, interrogation, argument, possible field trips and public events (depending on plague status in the fall), "workshopping," "woodshedding," etc.  Students will be responsible for leading some discussions on the work of our predecessors and contemporaries. 

Students will be asked to keep a dream journal.

Texts TBA.