English 359: Contemporary American Poetry Office: 953-5646 Spring 2006, MYBK 319 1MWF 22A Glebe St., Room 101 Dr. Julia Eichelberger [email protected] MTWTh 2-3 and by appt.
This course examines selected American poets writing since World War II. These poets employ a wide variety of styles and subjects, but all compose in light of the developments of modernist poetry, with its linguistic experimentation and its portrayals of outsiders, of madness, of a world now reduced to rubble (“a heap of broken images.”) For poets in the second half of the twentieth century, such fragmentation and multiple voices became the starting point of new verse. We will explore some of the many ways these writers have found to fashion beautiful poems, to celebrate and question American experiences, and to create meaning for the linguistic and social landscapes of their own time.
This class is designed for upper-level English majors or minors, creative writing minors, and other students with a strong interest in poetry. It will require skill in writing formal papers and conducting library research (i.e., at least 101 and 102 are prerequisites; 201, 202, and 207 are also recommended).
Texts: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol II (Contemporary Poetry). 3rd ed. (ISBN 0-393-97978-4) Poems marked with an asterisk (*) on the schedule below will be provided as handouts or on reserve through WebCT.
Schedule of Readings And Reading Response Assignments (This may be modified. I will inform you of any changes and post them on WebCT.)
1/9 Introduction to course 1/11 1940s Randall Jarrell (starts on 85 of anthology), “90˚ North,” “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” “Eighth Air Force”; Theodore Roethke “Dolor,”* “The Waking”* 1/13 1940s Robert Hayden (starts on 52 of anthology), “Middle Passage,” “Homage to the Empress of the Blues”
1/16 MLK Holiday 1/18 1940s Gwendolyn Brooks (140), “kitchenette building,”* “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story,”* “the mother”* 1/20 1940s Gwendolyn Brooks, “the children of the poor,”* “the rites for Cousin Vit”; Elizabeth Bishop, “The Map,” “The Man- Moth” Reading Response Notebook 1, Due 1/23. Choose one of the following: --Propose ways in which Hayden’s “Middle Passage” could be seen as a response to Eliot’s The Waste Land. --Identify a significant pattern of imagery (a recurring type of imagery or a series of connected images) in a poem by Roethke, Hayden, or Brooks. How does the pattern contribute to the meaning of the poem? --Discuss Brooks’ use of sonnet conventions in this week’s poems. 1/23 1940s Elizabeth Bishop (15), “The Monument,” “The Fish,” “At the Fishhouses” 1/25 1950s Bishop, “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” “Sestina,” “The Armadillo,” “The Shampoo”* 1/27 1950s Robert Lowell (119), “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” “After the Surprising Conversions,” “Waking in the Blue,” “Memories of West Street and Lepke” Reading Response Notebook 2, Due 1/30. Choose one of the following: --Unlike Brooks, Bishop often writes poems about things rather than people. Discuss the less obvious, but distinct human presence in “The Monument” or “The Armadillo.” --Choose one poem we’ve studied so far and discuss your view of what difference it makes, if any, to know the sex or race or nationality of the poet. 1/30 1950s Robert Lowell, “To Speak of Woe That Is In Marriage,” “Skunk Hour,” “For the Union Dead” 2/1 1950s Langston Hughes, selections from Montage of a Dream Deferred* 2/3 1950s Continue Hughes. Allen Ginsberg (334), Howl Reading Response Notebook 3, Due 2/6 Choose one of the following: --Use the Dictionary of Literary Biography or another long biographical essay to learn more about the life of Bishop or Lowell. After reading this, comment on how your knowledge of the writer’s life contributes to your understanding of one or two poems from this week or last week. --Discuss possible connections between “The Armadillo” and “Skunk Hour.” --Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred functions as a long poem. Discuss how two or three of the individual poems are connected. 2/6 1950s Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” “Sunflower Sutra,” “America,” and essay, “Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl” (1074-1077) 2/8 Brenda Marie Osbey, selections from All Saints.* Short paper due. 2/9 Brenda Marie Osbey reads, 7:30 PM, Alumni Hall 2/10 1950s-1960s Richard Wilbur (196), “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”; John Ashbery (384), “The Instruction Manual”; Denise Levertov (247), “Pleasures,” “The Ache of Marriage, “September 1961,” “Some Notes on Organic Form” (essay, 1081-86) WebCT Posting #1 Due Reading Response Notebook 4, Due 2/13. Choose one of the following: --Make a case for the literary artistry of a few lines by Ginsberg. Since these lines do not include rhyme, metrical patterns, or condensed language, what makes them artistically successful? --Make a case for the literary artistry of John Ashbery’s “The Instruction Manual.” --Richard Wilbur’s poetry is, more often than not, affirmative and optimistic. Argue for or against the optimistic worldview he presents in “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” Does he make such optimism plausible and relevant to contemporary readers? —Write a review of Brenda Marie Osbey’s poetry reading. 2/13 1960s Anne Sexton (431), “Her Kind,” “The Truth the Dead Know,” “All My Pretty Ones,” “The Starry Night”; 2/15 1960s Sylvia Plath (593), “Metaphors,” “The Colossus”; Adrienne Rich (456), “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” (1951), “Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law” (1963) 2/17 1960s Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song,” “In Plaster,” “Tulips,” “Blackberrying,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “The Applicant” Reading Response Notebook 5, Due 2/20 --Compare or contrast the use of vernacular or idiomatic language in poems by Lowell, Hughes, and/or Ginsberg. What do they accomplish through this diction, and what keeps the poems from being trivial or dull? --Discuss Anne Sexton’s use of the sonnet form in “All My Pretty Ones.” --Is it appropriate to classify Plath, Sexton, and Rich together, or do you believe there are distinct differences in their poetic techniques? --What makes either Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath different from her “confessional school” predecessor, Robert Lowell? 2/20 1960s Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” “Fever 103˚” “Ariel,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Edge” 2/22 Amiri Baraka (632), “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”* (1961), Ginsberg, excerpt from “Kaddish,” “To Aunt Rose”; A. R. Ammons (288), “Corsons Inlet” 2/24 1960s Gwendolyn Brooks “The Lovers of the Poor,”* “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,”* “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon”* Reading Response Notebook 6, Due 2/27 --Would you classify Plath as a poet of (white) female experience, or do you think this approach is not useful for understanding her poetry? (Alternatively, you may choose to answer the same question about Brooks and her gender and/or race.) --Relate the content of “Corsons Inlet” to its form. --Discuss ways in which Brooks uses concrete imagery and figurative language in one of this week’s poems to help readers see the world through the eyes of her characters. 2/27 1960s Amiri Baraka, “A Poem For Black Hearts,” “SOS,”* “Black Art”*; Brooks, Two Dedications,”* “The Sermon on the Warpland,”* “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”* 3/1 1960s-1970s Lowell, sonnets* (“Robert Frost,” “After the Convention”); “Dolphin,” “Epilogue” WebCT Posting #2 Due 3/3 Midterm Reading Response Notebook 7, Due 3/13 --Identify some similarities between Baraka’s “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” and “Black Art.” --What do you think Lowell is arguing for in his poem “Epilogue”? --Analyze a poet’s use of line breaks or sound in a free verse poem for this week. --Write an imitation of one of the poems we’ve studied thus far this semester. It should be at least 14 lines long and should imitate the syntax, syllabic patterns, and other technical features of the poem as much as possible. (Spring Break: 3/5-3/13) 3/13 1960s-1970s James Tate (837), “Stray Animals,” “The Blue Booby,” “The Wheelchair Butterfly,” “The Lost Pilot”; Charles Bernstein, “Semblance” (essay, 1111-1114) 3/15 1970s Richard Wilbur, “The Writer,” “Advice to a Prophet,”* “C Minor”*; Bishop, “Crusoe in England” 3/17 1970s Bishop, “Poem,” “One Art,” “In the Waiting Room” Reading Response Notebook 8, Due 3/20 --Apply Charles Bernstein’s essay to one of James Tate’s poems. --In what ways is Lowell or Bishop a different poet in his/her later years than he/she was earlier? --Which of the three Richard Wilbur poems for this week appeals most to you, and why? 3/20 1970s Adrienne Rich, “Orion,” “Planetarium, “Diving Into The Wreck,” Twenty-One Love Poems 3/22 1970s Continue Rich; Philip Levine (422), “Animals are Passing From Our Lives,”* “They Feed They Lion,” “Belle Isle, 1949,” “You Can Have It” 3/23 Stuart Dybek reads, 7:30 PM, Alumni Hall 3/24 1970s Anne Sexton, “The Death Baby,” “The Room of My Life”; A.R. Ammons, “The City Limits” Reading Response Notebook 9, Due 3/27 --What does Philip Levine do to celebrate the lives of the people (or animals) he writes about? How are these poems similar to or different from Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred? --Compare Levine’s “They Feed They Lion” to a poem by Baraka or Brooks that also comments on the social upheavals of the 1960s. --Discuss an extended metaphor that one poet uses and explain why you think it is or is not effective. --Write a review of Stuart Dybek’s reading. 3/27 1980s Yusef Komunyakaa (858), poems from Dien Cai Dau: “Tunnels,”* “Starlight Scope Myopia,” “To Do Street,” ”To Have Danced With Death,”* “Facing It”; Rita Dove, “Parsley” 3/29 1980s Rita Dove (974), “Adolescence-II”; “Poem in Which I Refuse Contemplation,”* Thomas and Beulah poems: “The Event,” “Straw Hat,”* ”Aircraft,”* “Roast Possum,”* “Thomas at the Wheel,”* “Magic,” “Dusting,”* “Weathering Out,” “The Great Palace of Versailles,” “Wingfoot Lake” WebCT Posting #3 Due 3/30 Natasha Tretheway reads, 7:30 PM, Arnold Hall 3/31 Continue Dove Reading Response Notebook 10, Due 4/3 --Identify a poet who is, in some thematic or technical way, a predecessor of Komunyakaa, and explain why you think this is so. --Listen to one of this week’s poets reading a poem from our syllabus, and discuss how their reading influences your interpretation of the poem. --Would you classify Dove as a poet of African American experience, or do you think this approach is not useful for understanding her poetry? --Write a review of Natasha Tretheway’s reading. 4/3 1980s Louise Erdrich (1004), “Captivity,” “Windigo,” “Dear John Wayne,”* “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways”* 4/5 1980s-1990s Louise Glück (818), “The School Children,” “Descending Figure,” “A Fantasy,” “The Wild Iris,” “Vita Nova” 4/7 1990s Dove, poems from Mother Love*: “An Intact World” (preface), “Mother Love,” “Persephone Falling” “Golden Oldie,” “The Bistro Styx,” “Her Island”; essay, “A Narrow World Made Wide: Rita Dove Writes a Poem”* Reading Response Notebook 11, Due 4/10 --Discuss one of this week’s poems about loss and grief, a poem that makes language and linguistic invention into a sort of consolation for personal losses. --Write an imitation of a poem we’ve studied. It should be at least 14 lines long and should imitate the syntax, metrical patterns, and other technical features of the poem as much as possible. 4/10 1990s Adrienne Rich, from An Atlas of the Difficult World*; Philip Levine, “Drum,” “What Work Is”* 4/12 1990s Yusef Komunyakaa, “February In Sydney,” “My Father’s Love Letters,” “Blue Light Lounge Sutra For the Performance Poets at Harold Park Hotel,”* “Anodyne”* Annotated bibliography due 4/13 Dean Young reads, 7:30, Alumni Hall 4/14 1990s Li-Young Lee (1039), “The Gift,” “Persimmons,” “Eating Alone,” “Eating Together,” “Pillow” Drafts of longer paper due. No Reading Response Notebook this week. 4/17 Draft workshop (by appointment; no class meeting) 4/19 Draft workshop (no class.) Read Billy Collins poems (all are *): “Introduction to Poetry,” “Marginalia,” “Nostalgia,” “Forgetfulness,” “Questions About Angels,” “A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal” “Picnic, Lightning” “The Night House” “This Much I Do Remember,” “Shoveling Snow with Buddha,” “The Death of the Hat,” “Sonnet,” “The Names” (2002) 4/21 College of Charleston Faculty Poets (Poems TBA) Reading Response Notebook 12, Due 4/24 --Billy Collins is not in this Norton anthology. If you like his poetry, argue for the artistry of one or two of his poems that you think are worthy of being anthologized. --Compare a poem by written after 1990 to an earlier poem we studied that treats a similar subject. Do they come to similar or different conclusions? --Discuss a poet from the syllabus whose craft you admire but whose poetry does not move you. --Discuss a poet from the syllabus whose work you have encouraged someone else to read this semester. 4/24 Discuss Billy Collins. Long paper due at beginning of class; discuss exam. WebCT Posting #4 Due 4/25
Final Exam: Monday, 5/1, 12-3 PM
English 359 Course requirements and grading: 90-100=A 85-89=B+ 80-84=B 75-79=C+ 70-74=C 60-69=D Attendance, participation, and quizzes 10 % Reading Response Notebook 15 % Shorter paper 12 % Longer paper 25 % Midterm 16 % Final 22 %
Tests: The midterm and the final exam will cover the poetry we discussed in class, and will include both objective questions and essays. The final exam will be comprehensive.
The reading response notebook will consist of short responses to questions I have provided. Responses will be in two formats: I. Hand in a total of nine responses in class on the due date (always a Monday). --Only paper copies will be accepted, in person, and on time. Only in very unusual circumstances may these be submitted early. They will not be accepted late. --Responses may be handwritten or typed. (Handwritten responses must be legible.) They must be at least 300 words long and they must answer one of the questions I have given for the week. --If they meet these requirements, they will receive an A (90). Responses will receive partial credit if they are too short or do not address what the question specified. II. Post any four of these responses on the class discussion board on WebCT. Post a different response by 12:45 PM on each of the following dates: 2/10, 3/1, 3/29, 4/24. These responses must be entered into the Discussion Board under the appropriate date; attachments will not be accepted.
Formal papers: The short paper will be an analysis of one poem using three secondary sources. The longer paper will require more research and will analyze several poems. For the longer paper, you will be required to submit an annotated bibliography and a rough draft, and to participate in a draft workshop.
Attendance, participation, and quizzes: 10-15 quizzes will be given at the very beginning of a class period. Many will be open- book. They cannot be made up if you are late or absent, but I will drop the lowest grade. More than 4 absences, for whatever reason, will further lower your grade. You must have copies of the day’s poems with you in class to be considered present. Excellent contributions to class discussions will also help your attendance and participation grade.
Other missed and late work: Except for the reading response notebook, I am willing to grant short extensions for papers for good reasons. Contact me immediately if you think you may not be able to turn in an assignment, or if an emergency prevents you from getting to class to turn in a paper or take a test. Missing the midterm or exam is extremely serious and, at my discretion, may or may not be made up.
Other policies: Plagiarism is unacceptable. You are responsible for knowing how to document material honestly and correctly. (If you are ever in doubt, please ask me; I am happy to help, and I don’t enjoy turning students in to the Honor Board.) All work submitted must be your own; any ideas, information, or wording that you find in another source must be properly documented according to MLA format. Failure to document such material properly (whether through ignorance, negligence, or malice aforethought) will result in an F for the course.
Campus readings: Whenever poets give public readings on campus, you are required to attend. See me if you have a truly unresolvable conflict with a scheduled reading, so that we can devise a substitute for this requirement. Poetry readings are always well worth your time.
How to contact me: If I am not in when you call my office (953-5646), email is the best way to get in touch with me. I don’t check the WebCT email every day; use [email protected].