JOHN CABOT UNIVERSITY
COURSE CODE: CW 454
COURSE NAME: Graduate Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry
SEMESTER & YEAR: Summer 2015
SYLLABUS
INSTRUCTOR: David Keplinger
EMAIL: [email protected]
HOURS: TBD
TOTAL NO. OF CONTACT HOURS: 45
CREDITS: 3
OFFICE HOURS: By appointment
PREREQUISITES / ADMISSIONS REQUIREMENTS
For undergraduate students, JCU or otherwise: Junior Standing and TWO previous creative writing courses with a grade of B or higher.
For American University (D.C.) students: current enrollment in AU's MFA in Creative Writing program.
For non-JCU/non-AU students who wish to receive graduate credit: a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution (transcripts required) and an assessment of a significant writing sample or previous publications (fiction: 20 pages minimum; poetry: 10 poems or twenty pages of poetry minimum).
COURSE AIMS
This course aims to develop the creative, editorial, and reading habits needed for the production of poems; to develop self-editing skills; to foster an aesthetic sensibility for use in writing poems. Students will read both contemporary and canonical poetry and materials related to analyzing and editing poems, and participate in a traditional creative writing workshop through in-class writing exercises, reading classmates’ poems, and producing their own poems and discussing them in workshop. Students will compile a portfolio of the work they produce during the term.
SUMMARY OF COURSE CONTENT
Every musician has a story like this. For years they hunched over the piano, or held the violin at their chin and the crick of their shoulders. They practiced scales, perfected arpeggio leaps, studied the theory of music and composition, memorized suites and torch songs, standards, interludes, and timed to the metronome their stamping feet. Before they really began to play, they had to learn the tradition and the physicality of their instruments; they had to learn to make a reed; to hear the sharps and flats; to change broken strings. They had to be mechanics and maestros. Then, they made music.
Why do we assume it isn’t the same for us? Even at the graduate level, far too many poets work selectively in safe parameters, reading the same writers over and over, and writing the same kind of poem. What is the poet’s instrument? It is as much the ear as it is the imagination. While I do not write exclusively formal poetry, I learned a love for it long after graduate school was over. While I have never written an epic, my favorite poems are epics: Gilgamesh, Gawain and the Green Knight, The Divine Comedy, The Iliad, and Song of Myself. I found out, particularly late (because I, like many poets, came to poetry first by writing it, not reading it) that I am a portion of a tradition out of which anything I write or think must come. By responding to it, I echo it. By departing it, I evoke it. I can’t escape my tradition; I embody it in words, lines, ideas, sentiments, and tone.
To manipulate and/or converse with the common assumptions and concerns of our readers, we have to learn tradition. We have to turn and look at what we are, before we write out into far-flung space. Even to reject tradition, we have to write our letter to the King and make the break; and we have to use the King’s language. Or, if we don’t feel so diplomatic, we have to learn about the King’s defenses and his weapons, when we use our weapons on the King.
As a model of a poet who understands all this, I look to Seamus Heaney, who writes today in free verse and in traditional forms when it suits him. All his forms are organic – they rise from the subject matter, and the subject matter rises from them. As a jazz trumpeter, Winton Marsalis does the same: he plays classical and jazz, never limiting himself to one view musically. He finds a vehicle for beauty in the strict and in the open-ended. In this course we will spend about 2/3 of every class workshopping poems; the other third will go to digging deep into the roots of our tradition. My hope is that you’ll leave the course with enough background to make informed decisions on the sounds and sense of your poems. My hope is that you’ll walk away with more materials; a more developed ear. Louis Armstrong once said, “My hobby...is using a lot of scotch tape... [I] pick out different things...and piece them together and make a little story of my own.”
LEARNING OUTCOMES
Students completing this workshop course will be familiar with the skills needed to produce poems, to self-edit work in progress, and to discern the characteristics of quality poetry.
TEXTBOOKS
Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1979.(PM)
Hollander, John. Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse,
Fourth Edition. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.(RR)
Strand and Boland, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology
of Poetic Forms. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.(MP)
WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
You will write and workshop eight poems over the next five weeks: an Anglo-Saxon form; a four beat elegy; a blank verse poem; a sonnet; a villanelle; a sestina; a pantoum; and a so-called “free- verse” form. I don’t require you to write revisions. On the last day of our workshop you are required to submit to me a notebook with all the poems on which I’ve written. It is very important that I receive the copies with my comments; they help me to evaluate your progress in my final summation and letter.
PREPARATION FOR WORKSHOP
Submit your work on time and always make copies for everyone. Also, your voice as a member of this workshop will be crucial. On each poem returned to its author, you will have written copious marginal notes, as well as an overview of your thoughts. Some other points, gleaned from experiences over the past year:
You are responsible for copies of the sheaf when you miss class. Ask someone in the group to gather them for you, or simply ask someone to make a copy of theirs.
When I say copious marginal notes, I mean copious marginal notes. I was thinking of asking you to type these out, but I decided against it—I first want to trust that you’ll put the required time into the commentaries. During the first week or two, I may ask you to bring in two copies of your comments (if I see that some in the group aren’t holding up their end) and collect one. This is a matter of respect for others, and it is teaching you to reach down and find illustrations for the way you feel about the poem—a skill you will use later on should you go into teaching.
GROUND RULES
The following ground rules will apply to the workshop:
See each other: When you make comments to an author, direct your words to her. When comments are being made on your poem, look up and see/hear who is speaking to you.
Hear each other: No bickering over details. Offer your feelings about what is working (or not), then leave the issue for the author to decide. Our time is short; I’ll cut off arguments so we can move forward and cover as much ground as possible.
Most of my comments will come once everyone has spoken. This is not to suggest that my answer is the right one. I don’t want what I contribute to the discussion to influence, negatively or otherwise, what the group has to say about the poem. My comments also serve to move the workshop forward to the next poem; speaking last helps me to facilitate the discussion.
LATE/ABSENCE
Attendance is not generally a problem, but it merits saying: Your presence in this class is the class. It is crucial you attend all workshops and arrive on time. If you miss more than four classes, you will fail the course. If there is some emergency, or if you are unable to make a few classes and know in advance, it’s best to see me so we can arrange (before the fact) for some kind of make-up work.
OFFICE HOURS
Please use my office hours as a time to consult with me on your progress, frustrations, and goals. I have set aside four hours weekly to this end. You may also contact me via email (with questions or with drafts) at any time. While workshop is the most effective way to stir you towards clarity and honesty and create a community of writers, there is little that can substitute for the benefits of one-on-one conferencing with a close reader.
ACADEMIC HONESTY
As stated in the university catalog, any student who commits an act of academic dishonesty will receive a failing grade on the work in which the dishonesty occurred. In addition, acts of academic dishonesty, irrespective of the weight of the assignment, may result in the student receiving a failing grade in the course. Instances of academic dishonesty will be reported to the Dean of Academic Affairs. A student who is reported twice for academic dishonesty is subject to summary dismissal from the University. In such a case, the Academic Council will then make a recommendation to the President, who will make the final decision.
STUDENTS WITH LEARNING OR OTHER DISABILITIES
John Cabot University does not discriminate on the basis of disability or handicap. Students with approved accommodations must inform their professors at the beginning of the term. Please see the website for the complete policy.
Please note that this schedule is provisional. Detailed guidelines, class dates & assignments are forthcoming. No reading or writing is required for the first meeting of our course.
COURSE SCHEDULE
Week One
Introductions. Anglo-Saxon verse. “Riddles,” (handout) Richard Wilbur, “Junk,”(handout); In-class: a riddle (object exercise). How to soften the anglo-saxon form? “Pig Slaughter.” Lecture on scansion. What priority is form? How does form carry ideas/traditions? (source material: PM Fussell, pp 62-75; RR, pp 1-12)
Poem 1 due. Workshop. Fussell, PM, pp 3-29.) The Norman invasion; strict accentual verse: the four beat medieval epic line. “From: Pearl,” (handout); The Ballad Stanza; “Sir Patrick Spens,” (handout); Eliot, “Preludes,” (handout). How do the ballad stanzas play with expectations? How do the four beat accentual poems carry elegy? Assign poem 2: the four beat elegy, softened form/loose accentual—the last time you saw the familiar dead: a letter.
Week Two
Poem 2 due. Workshop. PM Fussell, pp 30-61. Accentual syllabic verse and departures in form to incite emphasis. The Italian Sonnet and “the volta”. The narrative: James Wright, “Saint Judas” (handout); The Renaissance: Art, “the waiter world” of Lorenzetti and the mythical/everyday dialect. The English Sonnet forms developed from Petrarch; enjambments, and “prosperous departures.” The argument and list: Assign poem 3: a sonnet response from a character within.
Poem 3 due. Workshop. Catching up and checking in. Assign poem 4: Working on a turn.
Week Three
Poem 4 due. Workshop. All is well: the blank verse poem: Frost – “Out—Out—“ (handout); Assign poem 5: using the sense of the blank verse line to contradict your subject matter and conjure epic. Poem 5 due. How the British Civil War changed poetry, and the later return to strict forms. More French Frills? The villanelle. Plath, “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” (handout); Roethke, “The Waking,” (handout); RR, p. 40. the role of repetition in how a poem means. Why is the villanelle dark in English? Obsession and repetitive forms. Assign poem 6: the villanelle as persona poem. Workshop.
Week Four
Poem 6 due. Apprehending form: The “mysterious figure.” Avoiding wooden verse and precious language. Workshop. The Sestina: RR; p. 41; Assign poem 7: a sestina, or...a tempered 3 beat loose accentual narrative: NP, Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina,” (handout); Hecht, “The Book of Yolek,” (handout). Workshop. Romanticism: Non-capability in Keats; non-dualism in Blake; originality and genius, and the Preface to Lyrical Ballades. Organic forms. The pantoum. “Pantoum of the Great Depression” Donald Justice (handout). James Tate, “The Lost Pilot,” (handout).
Week Five
Poem 7 due. Workshop. PM, Fussell, pp 76-89. Free verse: “Having it Out with Melancholy,” Jane Kenyon (handout). Assign poem 8: a pantoum. Poem 8 due. Final Portfolios due. Workshop. A human breath and the limitations of the body: the spiritual urge to reach. “Sprung rhythm,” RR p. 22; NP, Hopkins, “The Windhover, p. 662.