The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

1835 [1841] Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sliding into Home Fiction/Contemporary Lit./Poetry

Writing Fiction
Tuesday 12/14/10 Turn in final stories. Workshops by request.
Thursday 12/16/10 Continuation of Workshops (Watch the blog in case of severe weather.)

Contemporary Literature
Tuesday 12/14/10 Continued discussion. Possible film.
Thursday 12/16/10 Optional final day. Watch blog in case of severe weather.

WRITING POETRY

Wednesday 12/15/10 Final poems Workshop.

HAVE A WONDERFUL HOLIDAY AND BE SAFE!

Contemporary Lit. Assignment

Write an elegy to an abstraction or inanimate object.

Consider Neruda's Odes for tone or the way O'Hara wrote of Billie Holiday's death or Lana Turner's collapse. Keep the tone more colloquial, full of details and a strong sense of voice. When writing about abstractions, avoid using many of them.

The poem must be ten lines minimum and brought in on Thursday, typed.

HOWL (Allan Ginsberg movie)

Attention all classes. Just now I am not pulling any showtimes for Friday of this week. I think if we check later on, that might change. For now, there are showtimes for Thursday night and if you're interested in doing so, you might assemble a group to go see the film. It is said to be excellent. I think there is a 7:50 showing on Thursday night and many available showtimes for today/Wednesday. Email me if you're gathering a group and I'll announce it here.
Thanks, s

Poetry Workshop

W 12/01 Bring in the imitations with copies enough for all. Read all of Don Bogen's book for discussion after workshop. Our workshop will be leaner (less me-speak) and we'll try to get through in one class or just over. Your final assignments will be two significant rewrites and an imitation of some aspect of Don Bogen's work. Those will be due on the last day of class UNLESS we have time for one more workshop, and then you'll be able to share them.

F 12/03 Workshop and/or An Algebra discussion.

W 12/08 An Algebra discussion
F 12/10 Workshop
W Turn in final packets: Two significant revisions & Bogen Imitation. (If we moved quickly enough, the Bogen imitation will have been workshopped and you will get to provide it as a third revision instead of first draft.)

F 12/17 YOUR HOLIDAY HAS BEGUN! HAVE A WONDERFUL BREAK & THANKS--You've been great to work with.

Thanks to those of you who remembered the questions for Lesley Jenike. (Sorry I forgot to ask for them.) I'll get those to her and get us started.

Have a wonderful, safe Thanksgiving!

POETS

w 11/17 Discussion of Ghost of Fashion.
Homework:
Read the poems from the NY poets below.
Please read: Frank O'Hara's Why I am Not a Painter, The Day Lady Died and Lana Turner Has Collapsed. (Same site as Why I am Not)

ALSO, have a question ready to ask Lesley Jenike about her book.

Also, Kenneth Koch's One Train May Hide Another & To You.

F: We'll complete the conversation about Jenike and look at the NY poets, as well.
Homework: Imitation of Jenike's poems. Some aspect or format. A response. Whatever inspires you from her work to yours.

Poetry Workshop

F 11/12 Group-led discussion of Jenike's book
Homework: Begin to decide what you will be imitating from Jenike's work. Which techniques? A particular poem? Bring copies sufficient for the class to be distributed on Friday 11/19.

W 11/17 Discussion of Jenike continued. We'll formulate our questions for her, etc.
Homework: Imitation poem

F 11/19 Distribution of workshop poems.
Homework: Read and comment upon workshop poems. Begin Don Bogen's book and be prepared to discuss it after Thanksgiving Break.

ENJOY YOUR HOLIDAY! BE SAFE!

Contemporary Literature

T 11/09/10 Watch Robert Lowell video, complete Confessionalist Movement.

Next stop: New York, School, that is. Read the essay about the school (hot-linked over the words NY School)
and this essay on Frank O'Hara as a Poet Among Paintersand this one on

Frank O'Hara

I would like for you to read all of the O'Hara poems, as well.

In anticipation of our ekphrastic assignment, please read this piece on Ekphrasis. Keep in mind that we are going to go about "ekphrasis" in a kind of reversal. You are going to be able to use poetry or literature to inspire art.

This assignment will be due the Thursday before the Thanksgiving holiday (November 18th) You will be presenting whatever your response is to ANY of the authors we've studied or any that you get approval from me to use.

H 11/11 Discussion of New York School
Homework all of Kenneth Koch's poems on this site and the biographical bit, too.

T 11/16 Continued New York School, Kenneth Koch,

H 11/18 Ekphrastic assignment presentations.

PLEASE VOTE TODAY!

POETS--Remember to bring

1. A "scary" poem or Halloween poem. You can approach "scary" any way you wish.
2. Something treatish, if you'd like or beverages to go with treats.

(I will bring the contraband lighting source and some treats, too.)

Confessionalist Readings for Contemporary Lit.

We're starting Plath today (in class, no worries) and you'll have the weekend. Remember your yawps need to be executed if they haven't been. (We're getting some great attention for this.

Readings:
Sylvia Plath bio.
And her poems
Before you panic,these are the required reading: Poppies in July, Poppies in October, Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Black Rook in Rainy Weather, Balloons, Mad Girl's Love Song, Burning the Letters

Anne Sexton (the bio and all of the poems--there are just four-five there) PLUS: The Bells Ringing the Bells Music Swims Back to Me

Robert Lowell bio read all the poems and the biographical information.

I grouped these all separate of the Berryman just because they worked together, (Lowell was their teacher) and were even institutionalized at the same point for a brief time.

This is a hefty amount of reading, so please start early and have lots to say about it. We'll watch Plath's video today and discuss it all on Tuesday.

Our next writers will be some of the New York School poets. I'll post reading links for them soon. (Frank O'Hara will be a big one, if you want to do any of your own scouting about.) Then, some Ashbery (I meant to say it this time) and so on.

Remember to update me on your yawps and anything you still hope we'll read, cover, discuss.

WRITING POETRY Your Formal Poetry Cheatsheet

Your next assignments (due a week from today)
10/27 will be the formal poem

You get a choice of one (you're welcome to do more of these as we roll along)
Don’t forget these terms, they will help you through the assignment.

Elizabeth Bishop’s
Sestina
and

One Art http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15212
(a villanelle) Other villanelles:

Roethke’s
I Wake to Sleep
http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/104.html

Dylan Thomas’
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good NightIf you find the villanelle compelling, but too restrictive, try the pantoum. It has a similar rocking motion to it, but offers a little more variety in the repetition.

Fiction Workshop Reminder

New Stories Due from Group One on Tuesday of next week.
Group Two=Thursday and so on.

----------------------

Writing Fiction Prompts

1. Choosing either an existing character or an entirely new story, write a setting that involves people gathering over something that they are passionate about (political fundraiser, church, art gallery opening, a new business, something that people work on to enact change or action) and have something intervene or enter the scene that is from the world outside of it. It can create a positive or negative version of tension but it should change "the temperature" of the room in some way.

OR

2. Have your character/s (old or new) respond to an object (my class example was a home being delivered in halves--a prefab home). Does such a dwelling resonate with your characters? Do they like modern art? How about a really funky Jeni's ice cream type flavor? Anything that you can place them in a scene and have them work with or against.

For Contemporary Lit

I found a few excerpts from Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions by Maurice Manning to help you see how the voice is similar for both boys. Both are considered "hillbilly" in the most ironic sense as they are both wise beyond the adults of the narrative and both speak in ways that are meant to seem them more self-taught than traditionally educated. Again, class informs the dialogue here more than race. And I am still interested in how you see the Berryman tendencies playing through some of the idea behind these poems.

Anyway, this little excerpt shows you a line or two in Law's voice.

Fiction Assignment

Tuesday 10/12/10
Working from Kathrine Wright's Why Write a piece that deals with a specific rationale. You can use this assignment to inspire your yawp piece or to advance an existing story.

For the yawp one, write anything in imitation. The nature of this piece kind of gets at some of what the yawp assignment suggests.

To advance an existing story, here's one way to do it (there are countless)

(Say this first paragraph is your existing story)
After Israel, we had changed me and Sammy. We came back with a souvenir unintended, like an overstretched sweater, we fit wrong. I tried to imagine that it would dissipate, that we would wear it off the way skunk musk--over time, with effort--could be diminished. But it was with us and it lingered.

(Incorporating the Why assignment.)
Because of that Saturday when we found the bottle tree, because of Aster, the harvest still sleeping in the garden, because of the snowfall that first January together, the avalanche that followed, because of eleven more Januaries, the dozen years folding over like ribbon candy with their ups and downs and rippled sweetnesses and brittleness.

Contemporary Literature

Tuesday 10/12/10 Bukowski
Tom Waits reads CB
An Almost Made-Up Poem
A Radio with Guts and Love is a Dog from Hell
Bluebird
Only the Truly Lost

Trivia: Barfly is loosely based on Bukowski.

Vonnegut discussion. The Beat vibe.
Homework:
Read John Berryman essays here (yes, all)
and this one
and this. Plus this. This interview

Thursday 10/14/10 More in the mix. Discussion of Berryman and Confessionalists.

EXTENSION FOR THE YAWP

I think you need another weekend. I would like to see these projects be really good and thoughtful.

Reviewing for each class:

Fiction/Poetry:

Prompt for yawps:

Manifesto Requesting that...
Rant Against/For

Or you can choose to ekphrastically respond by using painting, drawing, music, poetry, sculpture, etc. inspired by a piece of literature. If this is a public response--say leaving a canvas at a bus stop or decorating a tree, you must find a way to document it for the day of your presentation.

I would like all yawps sent along to Emma Bolden's site (The Yawp). Let her know your name, contact info and that you are a student of CCAD.
----------------------------

CONTEMPORARY LIT:

Any of the above or simply send in your manifesto and let me know that you did.

Otherwise, our next assignment will be ekphrastic and you can double-up or do something new for it. (Per our class discussion.)

Resonates well with our discussion of elegies

Condolence Note: Los Angeles
The sky is desert blue,
Like the pool. Secluded.
No swimmers here. No smog—

Unless you count this twisting
Brush fire in the hills. Two kids
Sit, head-to-head, poolside,

Rehearsing a condolence note.
Someone has died, "Not an intimate,
Perhaps a family friend," prompts

The Manners Guide they consult.
You shouldn't say God never makes
Mistakes, she quotes, snapping her

Bikini top. Right, he adds—You
Could just say, He's better off—or
Heaven was always in his future.

There's always a better way to say
We're sorry that he's dead—but
they're back inside their music now,

Pages of politeness fallen between them.
O do not say that the Unsaid drifts over us
Like blown smoke: a single spark erupts

In wildfire! Cup your hands, blow out
This wish for insight. Say: Forgive me
For living when you are dead. Say pardon

My need to praise, without you, this bright
Morning sky. It belongs to no one—
But I offer it to you, heaven in your future—

Along with silent tunes from the playlist,
The end-time etiquette book dropped
From the hand of the young sleeper.

It's all we have left to share. The book
Of paid respects, the morning's hot-blue
iPod, sunlit words on a page, black border.



Carol Muske-Dukes

Fiction Workshop Weekend Homework

Read this interview with Melanie Rae Thon and be prepared to discuss how her methods inform or contrast with your own.

Let's Yawp!

Lit-Kitties, we already did this! (Your manifestos!) Now let's show them off. Read this post and send yours in. I'll do one, too. As for you guys (poetry, fiction) it would be so easy to whip up a quick short-short or poem about change. Let's show them that CCAD can yawp with the best of them. Let me know if you need help submitting or coming up with a topic or exercise.

The posting below is by Emma Bolden, a fine poet and yawper in her own right. She sent it her facebook friends and I am passing it along to you:

You might already know about my new project The Yawp, a public poetry/community art project housed at www.TheYawp.com – and if so, I thank you (seriously, like, a Double Rainbow of gratitude) for your support and encouragement and yawping. I hope you don't mind me sending this mass-mailed message, but I'm organizing an exciting Yawp event for 10/10/10, which several organizations have designated as Global Work Day, a day to work to better the environment and spark positive change (skip to the last paragraph if you're a regular Yawper to see what's going on on 10/10/10!). What better way to do so than through community activism and art?!

A little background information about the site itself: for the past two semesters, I've given my poetry students one deceptively simple task as their final project. Their challenge? To find a way to get poetry out into the world. I was stunned with their inventive, exciting, and witty responses: poems Sharpied onto balloons which were then tied to fence posts and benches. Poems folded into origami boats, tucked in empty water bottles, and let loose in a local river. Poetrymobiles riding the streets of Lexington. Spontaneous public poetry slams. Poems written on white boards, on mirrors, on Post-It notes taped on appropriately-theme aisles in Wal-Mart – poetry was everywhere, and it was a beautiful thing. This summer, I started wondering what would happen if there was a place where others could respond to such a challenge, and post their responses – and thus The Yawp began.

The concept behind the site is relatively simple: write a poem (or story or essay or anything). Or find a poem (or story or essay or anything) that you really, really love, or that changed your life, or that you think other people need to read. Find some way to get that poem (or anything) out into the world (following, of course, all legal practices and laws and so forth). Take a photo of your Yawp, or tell the story of it, and I post it on the site – and, hopefully, other people will be inspired, and find their own way to get their own poem (or story or essay or anything) out into the world.

We exist in a time in which poetry and literature – and, well, all the arts, really – risk increasing isolation and separation from the community at large. We exist in a time when the writing community – and, well, the arts community as a whole, really – risks becoming increasingly divisive and divided. But we also exist in a time in which social networking brings us all closer together – and also increases access to literature and the arts. Some of the most inventive forms of poetry, from Flarf to the hay(na)ku to hypertext verse, have come into existence and proliferated on – and, in many ways, because of – the Internet. There are Twitter hash tags devoted to haiku and micropoetry and six word short stories – and I could go on and on.

I guess it all comes down to this: folks, people LIKE POETRY. People READ POETRY. And people WRITE POETRY. So why not create more opportunities to see art in the REAL community through the VIRTUAL community? And why not take this opportunity to spark change?

My challenge for 10/10/10 is simple: think about something you want to change, be it environmental or social or political – anything, really. Write about it. Or find writing about it. Get that writing out into the world. Or send it to The Yawp (we're accepting contributions online through Submishmash!) and I'll get it out into the world for you. If you're a teacher, get your students to write about change. If you're a parent, get your children to write about change. And bear in mind that writing is a form of action, of bearing witness – and that writing can inspire us to greatness, to empathy, and to move from writing about change to making change.
The Yawp
www.TheYawp.com
Today’s Yawp comes to use from the talented Cory Funk (known as “Q” in the photo, due to those ubiquitous and dreadful college bulletin board rules), who can be found as funkomatic on Twitter and monkeyrivertown on Flickr.

Everyday Use by Alice Walker

Fiction Second Workshop Notes & Impressions

Regarding the idea of the mimetic sense of a piece, or, for example, writing something in a confusing manner to suggest how confused or confusing was a situation to a character tends to backfire. When a reader is confused, the sense of credibility that would assure her/him that the sense of bewilderment is being engineered is troubled. A reader just feels as if the narrative is not clear, not as well-written and crisp as it might be. To establish a sense of the swirling confusion for the reader, you would want a good sense of what is happening that might contain a passage or paragraph or shift in perspective where some of the narrative gets foggy. Check out how it works in The Yellow Wallpaper (online) and you can see how unreliability gets established.


Consider "thisness" the idea of this love, this eating disorder, this day when this event happened as opposed to the larger, general catch phrases that make it easy for a reader to "relate." Readers "relate" best to that which is so specific, so detailed, so textured, so sensorily-rich that it makes it seem as if no other could be telling THIS story and that this time, this illness, this love are being told because they are so particular, unique and unusual. Because we feel this way when we are experiencing anything profound, the reader will often "relate" more to that sense, that intriguing telling than to the large, broad, general telling.


Imitations: The big question to ask is "how well can this function without the original text?" One way of handling this is to consider a new setting and one that perhaps provides a really informed perspective. EX: Here are the kilns and there is the slip.

Another way to tackle this is to "speak back" with information that is so voice-driven and original that it can apply without any "original text." Example: "I get it. The paperclips are alphabetized according to the minute variations in the way that they are bent. The soup is labeled with the soup-eater's first and last name, from this we are given to understand that the soup is someone's and that someone is not us. From this we gather too, that if someone other than Soup Eater opens this soup and consumes it, there will be event referred ever after as "The Chicken & Stars Incident." Soup is king in days that end with y as in Why this job? Why kill days with the steel edge of a full can of soup? Why leave them bleeding and hungry on the ground like that? But it's only Tuesday anyway."

As to Ands and other grammatical debates, check this out. Beware that you might still have to adhere to the rules as many people understand them. (Professors, etc.)

ATTENTION POETRY (NATALIE ONLY)

Hi there,

I am going to leave the official roll sheet in my mailbox in the main Liberal Arts Office.

The boxes are stacked on a file cabinet to the right of the door in the main lobby. Mine is about four down. There is a form for the roll sheet that I would like to have filled out (back) and delivered to One Stop after class (or as you leave for the museum.)

Thanks so much.
Sophia

WRITING POETRY EKPHRASIS ASSIGNMENT FOR FRIDAY

1. Make sure you sign in with Natalie.
2. Go to the museum or any of the galleries and find a piece of art that you would like to write a poem about.
3. Select any aspect of the piece: a character, the landscape, the artist and write from or to any part of the piece. You can use the letter form or you could write as if say, the woman from Woman from an Aquarium (just an example). Be sure to get the name of the piece.

For inspiration check out the following poems:

Musee des Beaux Arts

The Starry Night

Why I Can't Cook for Your Self-Centered Architect Cousin

Because to me a dinner table's like a bed--
without love, it's all appetite and stains. Let's buy
take-out for your cousin, or order pizza--his toppings--

but I can't lift a spatula to serve him what I am.
Instead, invite our favorite misfits over: I'll feed
shaggy Otis, who after filet mignon, raised his plate

and sipped merlot sauce with such pleasure
my ego pardoned his manners. Or I'll call Mimi,
the chubby librarian, who paused over tiramisu--

"I haven't felt so satisfied since..." then cried
into its curls of chocolate. Or Randolph might stop by,
who once, celebrating his break-up with the vegetarian,

so packed the purse seine of his wiry body with shrimp
he unbuttoned his jeans and spent the evening
couched, "waiting for the swelling to go down."

Or maybe I'll cook for us. I'll crush the pine nuts
unhinged from the cones prickly shingles.
I'll whittle the parmesan, and if I grate a knuckle

it's just more of me in my cooking. I'll disrobe
garlic cloves of rosy sheaths, thresh the basil
till moist and liberate the oil. Then I'll dance

that green joy through the fettucine, a tumbling,
leggy dishy we'll imitate, after dessert.
If my embrace detects the five pounds you win

each year, you will merely seem a generous
portion. And if you bring my hand to your lips
and smell the garlic that lingers, that scents

the sweat you lick from the hollows of my clavicles,
you're tasting the reason that I can't cook
for your cousin--my saucy, my strongly seasoned love.

--Beth Ann Fennelly

POETRY WORKSHOP HOMEWORK

Friday 09/17/10 Workshops Negation poem
Homework:
Write a poem following these steps:

1. Ask someone for a word and include it.
2. Find a foreign word or phrase and work it in.
3. A specific breed of animal and one bit of trivia about it.
4. The name of a city or country.
5. A flavor of ice cream or sherbet
6. A song phrase misheard.
7. One fact or figure from the news.

Use this in any order regarding any topic. Bring in one copy typed and ready on Wed.


Friday 09/24/10 Gallery poems assignment

Contemporary Literature

Thursday 09/16/10
Dickinson video.
Homework: Considering any of the poets we've discussed, write a one page manifesto in the spirit of Whitman or Ginsberg's America or Howl, Langston Hughes' Let America Be... or I, too, Sing America that directs a present-day command to America.


This should be a full page, single-spaced, not under 300 words.

Your upcoming larger reading assignment will include Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin and White Angel by Michael Cunningham.

Fiction Workshop Schedule & Homework

Thursday 09/16 In-class discussion of Orientation & How to.. pieces. Designation of Workshop Groups.
HOMEWORK: Read Alice Munro's Boys and Girls be prepared to discuss it.

Tuesday 09/21 Discussion of homework/in-class writing.
GROUP ONE DISTRIBUTES 18 copies.

Thursday 09/23 WORKSHOP ONE
GROUP TWO DISTRIBUTES 18 copies.

Poetry Homework

Write a poem using negation.

You can use any of the following prompts to begin or begin with your own.

1. Here's what didn't happen
2.There wasn't any__________, no _________________, or_______________
3. S/he/we/they/Matilda/etc didn't,/wasn't/hadn't ...

Employ lots of sensory detail, concrete imagery and specifics.

Choose any poem from one of the following sites
A B
C

and write an imitative poem.

Writing Fiction Homework

Read the following stories and know them well enough to "workshop" them.

How to Become a Writer

Orientation

Attention Poetry Class

Cindy King's book will not be available until later fall. Disregard the book order for it and just be sure to get the other two books.

Thanks.
s

Fiction Workshop

Thursday 09/09/10
Using the endings that you wrote for homework last class, you will spend the class period writing the start. Number one rule of in-class writings:
Keep your pen moving. If you get stuck, write the last thing you wrote over and over again until you can keep going.


Endings for those who might have missed class.

The remembering becomes one thing, flickering through the past like a small cameraman wandering the faded, paper-print rooms of a bliss dollhouse.
Someone was saying back again in Pakistan over the shouting from the next room. Someone excused himself from the party and walked out into a downpour. When he put his arms around his body, it looked like he was wrapping himself up in rain. I tried to remember who named their dog Only and who called their cat Satan but the names of the people had vanished. I walked out onto the deck at one a.m. and stretched out on my back beneath the early winter's ink well of sky, listening for crickets and longing for so many things whose names were just beyond my reach.
--------------------

We hadn't even started out yet for Amarillo but the horizon was Texas leaning into morning. There were reasons for most things, but what happened over summer could not be explained. Ray said that most of life was a multiple choice test and that some questions had several right answers but some were tricks: anything you chose wound up the same, wound up wrong. The trick was not to put too much into guessing about the ones you'd already answered. We'll never know if that's true but summer was in the rear-view mirror and up ahead, and inevitable town whose name sounded like a flower.
------------------

If he hadn't believed T before, he believed enough. The horses spooked during storms knew as much about fear, lightning, the way the world sounded angry when thunder commanded the sky. He wanted only now simplicity, a faith in only the weather's temper tantrums and _________________ and to find himself finally cattle-wise.

Contemporary Literature

Thursday 09/09/10
Whitman video, discussion.
HOMEWORK:
Fernando Pessoa

Also, go over the Dickinson reading and for the weekend's homework be ready to discuss Dickinson, the poem by Fernando Pessoa (link above)

this review of Lynn Emanuel that discusses her Whitman poem as well as how Gertrude Stein talks about America (a good quiz question would be how Stein describes America or one way that Whitman does).

Also, the introduction to The Beat Movement

Texts for Poetry:


An Algebra by Don Bogen

Ghost of Fashion by Lesley Jenike

People are Tiny in Paintings of China by Cynthia Arrieu-King

Thinking of You Guys

Just reading this morning and I encountered a couple of sentences that would have been nice to have had for the discussion yesterday on poetic terms. I am posting this for the Writing Poetry class but the Glossary of Poetic Terms link would be useful to all of you as you work on your dramatic monologues/Lynch pieces.

For example, the repetitions of both consonant and vowel sounds are really well-illustrated in the following lines by Bernard Cooper in his novel A Year of Rhymes.

"September ended in a stretch of white weather. The montone of morning would continue into noon."

Note the repeating short e sounds, the S and W and the T. There is near alliteration in September stretch, white weather, and monotone of morning and the n sounds throughout the second sentence are great examples of consonance, while the long o of monotone and morning are examples of assonance.

Paying attention to word choices and sound makes a sentence that otherwise just sets up a season and its quality of morning into something artful and pleasing to the eye and ear.

Writing Poetry Weekend Homework

Read all of the information and examples of the dramatic monologue here.

Also, go to the Lynch link on this blog (two entries down) and listen to some of the interviews there.

Your assignment for Wednesday is a dramatic monologue, at least twenty lines in length. Bring in one copy,typed, ready to read and discuss it, plus the Lynch interviews and all of the poems on the poets.org drama. mono. page.

Fiction Workshop Weekend Syllabus Installment

09/02/2010 Thursday
Discussion of Lynch project and your first writing assignment.
Consider the characters of your hometowns, people that Lynch might have interviewed and using one of them or a character from the documentary, write an opening scene to a story that uses someone else from one of these character's stories and has them telling their tale or one of the character's themselves continuing on or telling a new portion of the story that you make up for them or your own character--real or invented that tells a piece as if one of the Lynch characters.

Example: Seems like me and Izzy had been here longer than the river. Really we met in 1936 and Izzy's father just dead and me just fourteen and walking from church to home and school to home and nowhere else but Izzy's place was on that road and I saw him and he looked to me like something carved from the prettiest wood, gold-colored and satiny like that. Izzy smiled at me one Wednesday after school and he seemed like a big man on that tractor though he was just seventeen, he seemed uncle-old or like a big brother I wished I had.
The Andersons lived between our farms and their girl, all yellow-haired and bright-eyed, caught Izzy's eye first. Then the town caught fire and we lost our one bank, half the post office and Izzy's father had been caught on the second floor and after that, he was a changed-boy.

Contemporary Lit. Syllabus Installment Two

Thursday 09/02/10
Discussion of Whitman, David Lynch's Interview Project.
HOMEWORK: Considering one or more characters from the Lynch link, write a 250 word minimum response either in the voice of one of the characters or in Whitman's voice responding to, extending the story or drawing comparisons between Walt's ideas and the characters. Get as creative and theatrical as you like or you can do a kind of epistolary piece where you write back to or as Whitman or one of the people in the Lynch project. Type the piece up and bring it to class ready to read on Tuesday. Note which character or characters from the Lynch piece that you used and we'll play some of those in class.
Start familiarizing yourself with Emily Dickinson's work and biographical information.


Tuesday 09/07 Whitman discussion continues with your Lynch work incorporated.
Thursday 09/09 Whitman and Dickinson and some contemporary influences.

ALL CLASSES LINK to LYNCH PROJECT

Writing Poetry

The glossary of poetic terms gives a rough and simple set of tools.

Syllabus, First Installment, Contemp. Lit

SYLLABUS
Contemporary Literature
Tuesday, Thursday 2:00-3:20
KH 208


AUGUST
T 31 Introduction.
Poetic Terms, what makes something literature? Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman

Homework:
Read all of the biographical materials here:
Walt Whitman
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/126
and the following poems:
America: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20157
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20006
I Sing the Body Electric:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15753
O Captain, My Captain!
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15754
Song of Myself:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15755
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20277
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16402
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16133
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16083
When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20270

Emily Dickinson:
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/155


SEPTEMBER
H 09/02: Quiz and Discussion of Whitman, Dickinson.


T 09/07: Continued Discussion
Possible Movie.

Course Policy Autumn 2010 All Classes

Professor: Sophia Kartsonis
skartsonis@ccad.edu
www. zeldaville.blogspot.com

Text: We will work with various online texts. You are expected to read, note and bring in relevant print-outs.* Additionally, we will be watching many videos in here. The Voices and Visions series is invaluable for giving you a sense of the authors. Your attendance will be docked if you text, talk, sleep or use your laptop during these. (I will count you absent for any of the above.)
Attendance: So much of what we do and explain gets done in class, getting notes or trying to catch up even through the blog is not the most of what happens in here. For those reasons, attendance will be crucial. We will be reading a lot and dealing with that reading in class with writing assignments and activities.
Absences: You will be afforded two absences for reasons I will not need to know. I do not excuse any absence after that first one and if you accrue two absences (as the course is so short,) I will likely ask that you drop the course. Please don’t inform me as to the reason for your absence. What time you missed you will be expected to catch up on your own with the blog. Some things cannot be caught-up. Quizzes, class discussions, videos. Ideally, for a shot at a decent grade, you will be here every one of our too-few days.
Tardies: After two you have an absence.
Grades: You will be graded heavily on class participation and attendance: (30%) Your written work will comprise 70% of your total grade. Perfect attendance does not mean that you have that 30% guaranteed. I expect lively discussions and real engagement with the topics. I hate to resort to pop quizzes, but I have decided that we will be having quizzes many days before we begin discussion. It will be good for you to be prepared, have done the reading and to know that you will be quizzed. The blog contains any homework and updates. There are things mentioned in class that you may simply miss if you’re not here. Please be aware of that and factor it into your decision not to attend.
The written work will consist of some reading responses, in-class exercises and at least one artistic or ekphrastic interpretation of the material. Please be generous and thoughtful in your class discussions.
Cell Phones: Please turn them off. Brain surgery can wait.
Conference: I am available to conference with you at any time throughout the course. Please contact me in class or through the email address and we can set a time to meet.

Though two of my courses this semester are workshops, this final note while geared towards my literature courses, will benefit the creative writers, as well. Critical thinking, in every aspect of what we do, a reconsideration of what makes something appealing to us, or feel right and how, in a measured, thoughtful way, to make our arguments more balanced, based on reason and not merely opinion or the inheritance of opinion. Literature, quite literally, shows us its “politics” through character development, clarity of thought, eloquence, tone, theme and the whole writers’ toolbox with which you will become acquainted. I would like our class room to be the place where these stories and poems are used to learn about how good writing operates, but too, to suggest certain social and political themes. To do this well, we must be able to discuss many complicated and incendiary topics freely. To do that, we must agree to a considered and considerate delivery of ideas and the ability to separate the personal from the social, theoretical and political in the way we address our peers during these discussions.

If you have a documented disability as described by the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (P.L. 933-112 Section
504) and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), you may be able to receive accommodations to assist in
programmatic and physical accessibility. We recommend that you contact Disability Services at the One
Stop Student Services in the Loann Crane Center. Disability Services can assist you and the instructor in
formulating a reasonable accommodation plan and provide support in developing appropriate
accommodations for your disability. Course requirements will not be waived, but accommodations may
be made to assist you to meet the requirements. Technical support may also be available.

The One Stop Student Services officer designated as the Disabilities Advisor can help faculty with ways to make
accommodations for affected students, supply information about other services at the college, or make referrals.
The Disabilities Advisor can explain in detail faculty responsibilities and the college’s policies regarding
disabilities and special learning needs.

The Learning Center, located on the first floor lower level of the Loann Crane Center, provides students with peer
tutors, special computer-aided study tools, and access to assistance with their study skills. For more information,
contact the One Stop Student Services.

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Shadow of the Waxwing Slain'

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Shadow of the Waxwing Slain'

That this blog is named Anecdotal Evidence is apt. For all the free-flowing chatter about poetry, the one-phrase write-off of Larry Levis, (to some, to many, one of the most important poets of his generation,) seems to be itself a flat pronouncement rooted in an autobiographical perspective.

Still, the stuff about the birds themselves, the examples of how they work their way into poetry is a good jumping-off point for an assignment that employs research and story.

The rest of the blog does have some fun anecdotes, passages, observations by someone who is obviously a passionate reader.

Final Daze

08/02 MondayReliquaries turned in.
Take home optional assignment: colors and the language of color.


08/04 Wednesday

FINAL DAY
Turn in any poems you'd like in addition to the mandatory two rewrites.

Weekend Assignment Reliquary Poem

Here are some step-by-step guidelines. Use them loosely. Feel free to look up Poem to Keep What I Love by Taij Silverman.

A fifty-line minimum poem (five ten line stanzas or ten fives or one big block or several haiku, or single lines threading out, or a mix.)

1. Use at least six lines of anaphora. (Lines that begin with the same word or phrase.)

2. Write one aphorism or false wisdom or proverb. Love is the wax museum the torches of time visit.

3. Use one proper noun or more.

4. Include one off-rhyme and one eye rhyme somewhere throughout the poem. You can use more. Eye-rhymes look to rhyme but don't. Stone/one Love/stove

5. Consider the use of quotes or bits of found information, quotes, song lyrics, instructions, facts about the thing or things of your poem.

Think of this poem as a keeping place for things that would otherwise be in the junk drawer of our lives. Consider the way Silverman uses it, the things we discussed about figures in history or film, our own cultures, crayon factories, etc.

Have it typed with copies for Monday.

Thanks and have a great weekend.

Formal Poetry Assignment

Choose from a villanelle,
pantoum,
sestina,
sonnet,
and write a poem.

For Justin: Write one of the forms you haven't used.
In addition, include two revisions and email them to me.
(I will count the work you gave me today and you will be done with your required coursework for the class. Do keep in touch. It's been wonderful having you in class(es).

Formal Poetry Assignment

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke

Look to:

The Diagram

Born Magazine

Poetry Daily

Verse Daily


and either in one of those locales or somewhere of your choosing (Literary anthologies, google searches on your favorite poet/poem) choose a poem to bring into class and discuss why you selected it.

Using any element* of the objects you were given and beginning with one of these lines (though you can start with your own beginning instead, if you'd prefer) write a poem of ten lines or more.

The elements* of the objects can be anything from what they resemble in more "real" terms, to just a part of them: color or shape or taste or the concept behind them, the scene in which you might originally find them.

If there hadn't been _____________ we could recall____________

We asked of the _________ only this:

If the stars had asked us, we would have said

Another Example of the Historical/Fairytale Figure for Monday Night's Homework

Gretel in Darkness
This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .

Now, far from women's arms
and memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

Louise Glück

Sarah Winchester Speaks
In 1884, rifle heir Sarah Winchester bought a six-room farmhouse in
California and began renovations designed to trap the vengeful spirits
she believed responsible for the deaths of her husband and daughter.
When she died in 1922, the Winchester Mystery House contained more
than 160 rooms and 40 staircases.

No one knew what haunted me:
soldiers bivouacking in the unfinished ballroom,
deer and buffalo stampeding parquet halls,
and every night my baby crying, always
from a different room. Choking on sawdust
and plaster, I drew stairs that stopped
at the ceiling, doors that opened
to blank walls or two-story drops, hallways
that doubled back. I gave my ghosts the best
of everything—Tiffany windows,
gold dinner service, thirteen-bulb chandeliers—
but couldn't put a single soul to rest
or rest myself. I died before I understood:
I haunted my house as much as they did.
William and the baby are waiting for me,
but I'm trapped by blind chimneys, skylights
stacked on top of each other, stairs I can't help
but climb, the maze I made to stay the dead.

Copyright © 2010 Carrie Shipers All rights reserved
from Ordinary Mourning

Homework Assignment 07/12 DUE with COPIES on Wednesday 07/14

Write a poem of twelve lines or more that employs
1. enjambment
2. off or slant rhyme
3. internal rhyme
4. alliteration
5. assonance
6. consonance

at least once (though more uses are fine) throughout the poem.

Write a poem that uses a place, city, town, house, etc. that has secrets (or one) that the speaker of the poem knows.

Ex:

Downstream from where I washed my sister's
dress in the current, floated a body.
I had been there all day and it told
nothing to the rocks that shimmered
beneath its lips, and nothing to the sunlight
that danced its coded bleeps of glitter
borrowed from my patch of river
and moved along to the song
of dead girls and living girls
and the open rose of summer's beginning
as well as its close.

Writing Poetry 490B-01
Monday, Wednesday, Friday 12:30 a.m.-4:20 p.m.
Sophia Kartsonis
skartsonis@ccad.edu

Text: Rhyme’s Reason by John Hollander. Available online at Amazon for a song. Find any edition in any (reasonable) condition you can and order it today.
For now the glossary of poetic terms gives a rough and simple set of tools.
Various online poems. Please have a printout available for days we are discussing them.

Course Policy
Attendance:
Because we are taking a fast train through the subject matter, as summer courses often require, attendance will be crucial. We will be reading a lot and dealing with that reading in class with writing assignments and activities.
You will be afforded one absence for reasons I will not need to know. I do not excuse any absence after that first one and if you accrue two absences (as the course is so short,) I will likely ask that you drop the course.

Tardies: After two you have an absence.

Grades: You will be graded heavily on class participation and attendance: (30%) Your written work will comprise 70% of your total grade. Perfect attendance does not mean that you have that 30% guaranteed. I expect lively discussions and real engagement with the topics. I hate to resort to pop quizzes, but if during discussion it becomes apparent that a few of us have done the reading and the rest are coasting, I will administer a quiz.

The written work will consist of some reading responses, many in-class exercises, and the “letters to the authors” and comments on workshop poems. Please be generous and thoughtful in your assessments and comments on other’s work.

Cell Phones: Please turn them off. Brain surgery can wait.

I am available to conference with you at any time throughout the course. Please contact me in class or through the email address and we can set a time to meet.

Writing Poetry Homework for Friday 07/16 & Monday 07/19

Reading Assignment: Read the following poems at least three times through. Be ready to discuss them. (Yes, quiz-ready.)

The Poet
Poetry by Pablo Neruda

Several Things by Martha Collins

Why I am not a Painter
My Heartby Frank O'Hara

Dear Reader by James Tate

Eating Poetry by Mark Strand

An Obsessive Combination... by Anne Sexton

The Writer by Richard Wilbur

Poetry by Marianne Moore
What does Marianne Moore mean when she says "I, too, dislike it" Be ready to discuss why she takes the pains to write a poem about not liking poetry. What makes a good poem and what makes poetry somewhat unlikeable to some.


Poem as a _____

Select from the following: Poem as a Machine, Poem as a Machete, Poem as an All-Purpose Cleanser, Poem as a Gyroscope, Poem as a Garden, Poem as a City, Poem as a Glass Cleaner, Poem as a New Math, Poem as a Recipe, Poem as a Guide for Installing Car Stereo Speakers, Poem as a Colorwheel, Poem as an Imaginary Travel Guide.

And write a poem, ten line minimum.
have it ready for class a week from Wednesday. (07/21)

Note: The poem is due, typed, with copies for everyone in class (including me)at the beginning of class on Wednesday 07/14. There will be one more assignment posted as your Monday homework (07/19). That assignment will also be due on Wednesday the 21st at the beginning of class.

Have a good weekend, Students My Students

O Me! O Life!
O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me; 5
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
--Our old friend, Walt Whitman

Elizabeth Bishop
Read the biographical stuff
and One Art.

At the Fishhouses

Filling Station

Visits to St. Elizabeth

Sestina

Theodore Roethke

The Waking

Elegy for Jane

My Papa's Waltz

Beat Poetry Movement

Allen Ginsberg
A Supermarket in California

Early draft of America

America

Howl

ee cummings

i carry your heart

anyone lived in a pretty how town

paintings

Read Langston Hughes

Read: All of the poetry and the biographical information. Have a sense of his place in the Harlem Renaissance and what that term was and meant.

The Jazz Age was defined by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Read the following:
Quotes by Zelda

Look through all the links. It is kind of playful but also very interesting.
Zelda art and etc.A subjective but kind of int. overview of Fitzgerald's life.

Next Readings

Introduction to Modernism
Read Wallace Stevens
POEMS: (Be Quiz-ready on all of today's reading)
The Snowman, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Thirteen Ways of Looking..., Disillusionment of Ten O'clock
---------------
Imagism
Ezra Pound
And the poems In a Station of the Metro, The River Merchant's Wife,

William Carlos Williams
Read the poems: This is Just to Say, Spring and All and The Red Wheelbarrow

---------------
Robert Frost
And these poems: After Apple-Picking, The Road Not Taken, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Directive, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Mending Wall.

FIRST ASSIGNMENT DUE Tuesday 06/29

You will have two types of larger assignments coming up.

The first (due to be presented on Tuesday 06/29) is to be an ekphrastic or artistic response to a piece of writing or literary movement we have studied. You can choose anything up to the due date. (Whitman, Dickinson, Woolf, Gilman, etc.)

Your response can be in drawing or music, sculpture, animation, illustration, fashion, advertising. Be prepared to ask any questions in class.
-------------------------
You will also be writing a formal poem (sonnet, villanelle, pantoum or sestina) based on a piece of art. Begin thinking about gallery or museum exhibitions that you would like to consider for this piece. I will give you an "outing" afternoon to take notes. For now, just begin thinking about it.

Syllabus Update Thurs.

For today, you will be watching the Whitman film and we will be doing an introduction to Emily Dickinson. Beyond that, the weekend will include a large reading assignment by Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
I'll post more specifics on that later.


The Dicknison poems we will begin today but that must be read thoroughly (quiz-ready) by next week are:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20283
The Soul Selects

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20466
Safe in their Alabaster

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20250
My Life Closed

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15391
I Felt a Funeral

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15394
I Measure Every Grief

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15393
I Heard a Fly

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15392
I'm Nobody

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19729
Hope is a Thing

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15389
I Taste

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15396
Fame is

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19039
Wild Nights

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15390
There's a Certain

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19730
There is no Frigate
--------------------------
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
http://www.online-literature.com/charlotte-perkins-gilman/

The Yellow Wallpaper
http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Charlotte_Perkins_Gilman/The_Yellow_Wallpaper/The_Yellow_Wallpaper_p1.html
or
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html

Virginia Woolf:
About a Room of One's Own
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Room_of_One's_Own

A Mark on the Wall
http://www.bartleby.com/85/8.html

Course Policy and First Week

Readings in American Literature
Tuesday through Thursday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.
KH 224
Sophia Kartsonis
skartsonis@ccad.edu

Text: We will work with various online texts. You are expected to read, note and bring in relevant print-outs.
Additionally, we will be watching many videos in here. The Voices and Visions series is invaluable for giving you a sense of the authors. Your attendance will be docked if you text, talk, sleep or open your laptop during these. (I will count you absent for any of the above, and that will mean dropping the course with the stringent absence policy I have for summer—see below

Course Policy:
Attendance:
Because we are taking a fast train through the subject matter, as summer courses often require, attendance will be crucial. We will be reading a lot and dealing with that reading in class with writing assignments and activities.
You will be afforded one absence for reasons I will not need to know. I do not excuse any absence after that first one and if you accrue two absences (as the course is so short,) I will likely ask that you drop the course. Please don’t inform me as to the reason for your absence. What time you missed you will be expected to catch up on your own with the blog. Some things cannot be caught-up. Quizzes, class discussions, videos. Ideally, for any shot at a decent grade, you will be here every one of our too-few days.

Tardies: After two you have an absence.

Grades: You will be graded heavily on class participation and attendance: (30%) Your written work will comprise 70% of your total grade. Perfect attendance does not mean that you have that 30% guaranteed. I expect lively discussions and real engagement with the topics. I hate to resort to pop quizzes, but I have decided that we will be having quizzes many days before we begin discussion. It will be good for you to be prepared, have done the reading and to know that you will be quizzed.

The written work will consist of some reading responses, in-class exercises and at least one artistic or ekphrastic interpretation of the material. Please be generous and thoughtful in your class discussions.

Cell Phones: Please turn them off. Brain surgery can wait.

I am available to conference with you at any time throughout the course. Please contact me in class or through the email address and we can set a time to meet.



JUNE
T 15 Introduction.
Poetic Terms, what makes something literature? Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman

Homework:
Read all of the biographical materials here:
Walt Whitman
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/126
and the following poems:
America: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20157
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20006
I Sing the Body Electric:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15753
O Captain, My Captain!
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15754
Song of Myself:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15755
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20277
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16402
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16133
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16083
When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20270

Emily Dickinson:
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/155

W 06/16: Quiz and Discussion of Whitman, Dickinson.


H 06/17: Continued Discussion
Possible Movie.

FYI MY Poets, I'll miss you

As one of my former students said to me and as I now steal from her:

Keep it summer!

If this class taught nothing else, go more vivid, more "feelingly" and with great attention into June and everything after...

And, keep in touch,
s
:-)

VOTE HERE FOR KATE & SOPHIA!

http://www.yourmic.com/videos/reel-love-film-contest/464/last-leg.html

26 w Brainstorm for long poem and revisions

27 h Revisions or revision due. Long poem in class writing prompts. BE HERE.(This should be very useful.

28 f Long Poems Festival. (Yours.)

Some Thoughts After Today's Class

While reviewing manuscripts this afternoon, I came upon a poem about the giant squid and how it essentially ate with its brain. http://invertebrates.si.edu/giant_squid/page3.html

I thought about Meghan's poem and the possible intersections b/w its picking brains intellectually, picking brains in zombie-fashion and the squid's other "take" on that territory. If useful, feel free to use that.

Also, I thought about the poems of Neruda, Sexton and so on, and their use of objects. We might consider some of these as we are examining one another's object poems.
Neruda: http://www.motherbird.com/artichoke.html
http://motherbird.com/smell_wood.html
http://www.motherbird.com/lemonode.html
http://motherbird.com/olive_oil.html
http://motherbird.com/ode_piano.html

Anne Sexton:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc88gjuQCR8

M 24 Sestina workshop. Introduction to 13 Ways poem.

Homework: 13 Views Typed-up, edited. Look to this poem for a way to do this: http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-13ways.html
1. See your object in a larger-scene.
(Ex: Downtown, between the towering bank
and the boarded-up apartment building
with a woman's name, in the cursive lower
case ls and ds, were slightly bent paperclips.
Include a character's simile towards the object or some version of it.
2. I was feeling like the dying-out of cursive,
loopy, out-of-date, de-scriptive but inscrutable.
3. The paper clip held the details of our home's value,
our marriage's depreciation.
A scene of two people and the object. Two simple declaritive statements of description (only concrete terms) only one of which need mention the object.
4. Clippers,one snip,
and gone.
A clipper, a clip
holding-on.
5.
Make a simple statement of dialogue and include the object.
To define the paperclip, I examined the suffix.
To define clip, I looked up clipper
1. a person or thing that clips or cuts...6. a person or thing that moves along swiftly.
6.....

Note for Michelle: Bring your object and copies of sestina in tomorrow. You'll workshop in reverse and we'll have you all caught up by Wednesday. (We'll workshop your sestina while others workshop 13 Views and then you'll be right on board for the long poem and revision workshops.

T 25 Workshop Thirteen Ways. Introduce other long poems for larger assignment.
Homework:The Long Poem Look to: T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Eliot Khalil Wilson, Anne Sexton,

MAY (flowers brought to you by April showers—exact rhyme
M 17 Introduction.
Poetic Terms, what is a poem. Discussion of blank verse and free verse. Voices and Visions Robert Frost. Free Verse: Frank O’Hara: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ohara/ohara.htm
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=5092
Fun to Browse through online (Poet Among Painters)
http://books.google.com/books?id=31Pqv32Fh0QC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Frank+O%27Hara&source=bl&ots=uAhwh65_YB&sig=buEKI5iTf6_xVgp1d4ampXehGaQ&hl=en&ei=XiXxS-DzJsT38Aby2ND9Cg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=12&ved=0CDQQ6AEwCw#v=onepage&q&f=false
In-Class Writing.
Homework: Bring in some song lyrics that you consider to be a poem or to be poetic. If possible, bring us the means to hear or play the song, as well as access to the lyrics on the page. (You can use the computer and projector so as to save the environment some grief.) Anyway, using your new shiny terms of poetry, talk about how and why this piece strikes you as poetic.

T 18 Song lyrics. Frost introduction. Discussion of more terms, formal elements. In-class writing of couplets.
Homework: Write a poem that employs at least six of the new terms you have been learning. You can count anaphora, metaphor, simile, etc. The poem should make use of one public belonging that feels somehow personal to the narrator (like that moment before entering the Lincoln Tunnel--one of those public things you've no right to but feel you own -mangled paraphrase of Jacqueline Osherow)

W 19 Introduction to Formal Verse.
http://www.utm.edu/departments/english/everett/sonnet.htm
http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sonnet.html
http://www.sonnets.org/basicforms.htm


Homework: Write a sonnet. Bring in enough copies for the class.

H 20 Sonnet Workshop. Villanelles, Pantoums. Homework: Write a villanelle or pantoum, bring 7 copies.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5796
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5786

F 21Sestina
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/03/ahead/sestina.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sestina
http://www.uni.edu/~gotera/CraftOfPoetry/sestina.html


Homework: Write a sestina to be workshopped on Monday. Bring 7 copies/ ALSO, don't forget your TWO OBJECTS. One object will be one that you will want to ruminate upon in a number of stanzas, the second will be one that you would be willing to "donate" to another student. They don't need to be anything alike and they can be something from nature, a thrift shop, a playing or post card, a shard of pottery, a found pinecone or seashell, anyway, a thing, compelling enough that someone might want to work with it for some time.
Two-Day CaesuraM 24 The Long Poem Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, Eliot KhalilWilson, Anne Sexton,

MINIMESTER

Writing Poetry
Monday through Friday 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
Sophia Kartsonis
zeldaville@yahoo.com

Text: Rhyme’s Reason by John Hollander. Available online at Amazon for a song. Find any edition in any (reasonable) condition you can and order it today.
For now the glossary of poetic terms gives a rough and simple set of tools.
Various online poems. Please have a printout available for days we are discussing them.

Course Policy
Attendance:
Because we are taking a fast train through the subject matter, as summer courses often require, attendance will be crucial. We will be reading a lot and dealing with that reading in class with writing assignments and activities.
You will be afforded one absence for reasons I will not need to know. I do not excuse any absence after that first one and if you accrue two absences (as the course is so short,) I will likely ask that you drop the course.

Tardies: After two you have an absence.

Grades: You will be graded heavily on class participation and attendance: (30%) Your written work will comprise 70% of your total grade. Perfect attendance does not mean that you have that 30% guaranteed. I expect lively discussions and real engagement with the topics. I hate to resort to pop quizzes, but if during discussion it becomes apparent that a few of us have done the reading and the rest are coasting, I will administer a quiz.

The written work will consist of some reading responses, many in-class exercises, and the “letters to the authors” and comments on workshop poems. Please be generous and thoughtful in your assessments and comments on other’s work.

Cell Phones: Please turn them off. Brain surgery can wait.

I am available to conference with you at any time throughout the course. Please contact me in class or through the email address and we can set a time to meet.

Botticelli Balloons Go Far!

Kudos again to Chelsea for the magical idea and to all of you for participating.
-----------------------

To whom it may concern. my husband was walking in the woods and found 2 of these poems. One is titled doesn't matter by Brie And the other said Fly little ballon way up high. Float away into the azure skies. Find your way to some distant land, find your way to someone's heart. didn't give an author. We live in a little town called Bergholz, Ohio. It's about on hour drive to Pittsburg,Pa. and 3 hour drive to Cleveland, Ohio. We live out in the country. Please let me know where these poems came from. Very interesting. Hope I was some help. Have a blessed day. Margie Nighman




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Date: Fri, May 7, 2010 at 5:05 PM
Subject: found bottle
To: botticellimagazine@gmail.com


Hi, i found your balloon on the shore of Pine Lake in North Lima, Ohio. The poem reads "Many are inflated but never rise, the lost balloons in their eyes."

One of Your Guys RIP

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/arts/artsspecial/11frazetta.html?ref=obituaries

Friday's Prompt--Balloons

1. There were lost balloons in his/her/your/Agatha's/Wednesday's/winter's/ eyes.

2. "Let what rises live with what descends..."

3. Something about balloons

4. Use the name of a flower, five colors, a kind of cloud and a type of knot or stitch.

5. The sun/moon rose like a lost balloon.

CONTEMPORARY LIT

Tuesday April 27: Plath video. Opening discussion.
Be sure to be able to discuss why the Beat movment is thus-named and how the Confessionalists enact their confessions variously. Consider the Sharon Olds' poem, Sex Without Love and how it "confesses" similarly. (SEE BELOW)


Thursday April 29: Beats, Confessionalists

Tues. May 4 Confessionalists continued (including Olds)

Thurs. May 6
Final Projects due on May 6. Be ready to present.

Sex Without Love
by Sharon Olds

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Contemporary Literature

Please read all of the Anne Sexton & Sylvia Plath selections, as well as the introductory materials in your book.

There is a very good chance that I will have a quiz at the beginning of class, so be prepared. If you have read the work the quiz will be easy.

Contemporary Lit.

Final Project: Looking to the poets, writers and movements up ahead I would like to see you each do a response to be presented the first week of May and in any genre.

A warning: you must plan ahead, must present on the day these are due and I will not accept anything late or excuses on this project. It is important that you do this, on time and thoughtfully. Talk to me about

Excellent Poetry Reading Opportunity Tonight!

Mark Doty

http://www.markdoty.org/

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/91


Tuesday, 4/20, 8 pm Riley Auditorium, Batelle Fine Arts Center at Otterbein.

ALL CLASSES:

Matthew Guenette's reading on Monday is required. Please plan to attend.
11-12:30 Monday, April 19, Canzani Auditorium

Contemporary Lit final weeks

Tuesday 04/12 Voices and Visions Frost (have to plug him in before the others mentioned.)

Homework: Read Robert Frost,
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/192
read: Design, Directive, After Apple-Picking, For Once, Then Something, Birches, The Road Not Taken,



Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks for next time.
Additionally,
read the bio. information on WCW here:
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/119

Red Wheelbarrow: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15537
This is Just to Say: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15535




Thursday 04/14 Frost discussion, Williams and Bishop.

Homework: Read Carolyn Forche's The Colonel (your book)

Reminder: NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

Contemporary Lit. Students, please be sure that you have completed the assignment (some form of public engagement with poetry and a photo or emailed description to me of where and how).

This was your assignment for last week and we discussed it in class.

We will be looking at Williams, Frost and diving into the Beat and Confessionalist crowds over the next two weeks. For now, be sure you have completed your installations and let me know.
------------------

Fiction Workshops you are beginning your new cycle of workshops. All Group Ones should be distributing and ready to workshop this week.

Fiction Workshop

Tuesday & Wednesday 03/30 & 31 In-class writing.



Thursday & Friday 04/08 & 09 Independent Study. More details forthcoming.

The following week we distribute stories for the new rounds. STORIES MUST BE TURNED IN ON THE DAY THAT THEY ARE DUE WITH SUFFICIENT COPIES. THIS TIME I WILL ACCEPT NONE LATE AND NO EXCUSES. We will fall too far off track and cost the more conscientous students some time and attention if we slip off the schedule again. No story this round will amount to a zero and no ability to make it up. If there is a foreseeable issue, talk to me IN ADVANCE. I have to be able to adhere to this so please don't ask for exceptions. We have a lot to do in this wind-up month.

Contemporary Lit.

03/30 Tuesday Hayden & Roethke discussion

04/02 Thursday Presentation of Modernist pieces

Homework: Read Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin (your anthology) and Michael Cunningham's White Angel. (hand-out) Compare, take copious notes, plan to lead a discussion about the way p.o.v., class, time, theme, tone, etc. compare.


04/06 Tuesday Discussion of Sonny's Blues and White Angel.

04/08 Thursday Independent Study. Specifics coming.

FICTION ASSIGNMENTS FOR THURSDAY & FRIDAY

1. Use one image that is surreal but borrows from the real world
2. One invented word or phrase, neologism, spoonerisms, etc. all good.
3. one object given as a gift.

Friday class: please watch the blog for particulars on where your class is meeting. I'll post more by 5:00 p.m. today or sooner.

Also, the Group One stories for Wed. Fri. will not be workshopped until Friday AFTER break. That means that any remaining group one members must distribute on Wed. of our return. Group Two on Friday and so on.

Tuesday-Thursday, your next round begins on Tuesday of the following week. (After break.)

Have a lovely break and be safe.

Contemporary Lit

Gertrude Stein

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FasbBkzbnNE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9PElQHVSks&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjRXUqS-PsQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V53DU3IEzRc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRnkZAAjlYs&feature=related

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Gertrude_Stein.aspx

Contemporary Literature Syllabus Update

Homework over Spring Break

From your anthologies, read the following selections.
Theodore Roethke: My Papa's Waltz
Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays
All of the Elizabeth Bishop selections
Gwendolyn Brooks: We Real Cool and A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Miss...

Story: Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin.

After Break we will be reading some of Robert Lowell Skunk Hour, For the Union Dead and For Roethke. All of the Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Kerouac. After that, Plath, Sexton, Forche, Nye, Raymond Carver, Sandra Cisneros. I'll assign more specific dates but if you're worried about reading-ahead, those will be the authors and selections from our books.

Have a fun (and very safe!) break. See you soon.

Contemporary Literature

Your next big assignment will be due on the Thursday of the week after Spring Break.

The assignment, as we've been discussing in class, will deal in some way with one of our literary figures and tackle it through ekphrasis (which, for our purposes, will be the idea that art inspires art or literature inspires art.)

Consider Auden's Musee de Beaux Arts and how it began with a myth (Icarus) which set off a painting that was written about by Auden in the poem.

Fiction Assignment

Go outside. Note three new things that are revealed by the sunlight or that you notice anew. One thing should be found on the ground.

Include one character who is confused about the time of day or place he or she is occupying.

Have something happen in a public place that creates tension.
(Ex: at the thrift store on Sunday a man was poking a little girl in the forehead and telling her "I am gonna f(*k you up!" The girl was not older than eight.) The exchange was loud and people from several aisles away were watching.

Include one beverage.

FEATURES OF MODERNISM

* A strong and intentional break with tradition. This break includes a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views.
* Modernists believe the world is created in the act of perceiving it; that is, the world is what we say it is.
* Modernists do not subscribe to absolute truth. All things are relative.
* Modernists feel no connection with history or institutions. Their experience is that of alienation, loss, and despair.
* Modernists champion the individual and celebrate inner strength."Mirrors instead of windows."
* Modernists believe life is unordered.(The fragmented, broken, pieced-together.)

* Modernists concern themselves with the sub-conscious.


Read more: http://www.brighthub.com/education/k-12/articles/29453.aspx#ixzz0hE3cCn0n

Contemporary Literature

Tuesday 02/02 Ezra Pound video
Homework: Consider Modernism, Pound, Stevens and Gertrude Stein for Thursday and next Tuesday's discussion. Be ready to discuss and contribute.

This week and next will finish up Modernism. Reading assignments to be posted on Thursday for next readings.

Thursday 02/04: Discussion Modernism, Stevens, Pound, Stein.

Tuesday 02/09 No Class.
Homework: Stein's biographical information.
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/315

Thursday 02/11 Modernism discussion final notes.
Homework:

Contemporary Literature

Next week we read Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound

TUESDAY 03/02
The Stevens Readings are all here. The poems are on links to the right.
I would like for you to have read for Tuesday:
The main page biographical information plus:
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The Snow Man
Sunday Morning
The Idea of Order at Key West
The Emperor of Ice Cream

All links are on that site.

THURSDAY 03/04
For Thursday and Ezra Pound please have the following read:

The biographical page plus

All the Cantos on that page.
The River Merchant's Wife
At a Station at the Metro

Have a great weekend.

Prompts for W-F Fiction Class.

Choose one trigger statement and take off from it:

1. If it wasn't_________________, if you/s/he/I weren't________________ and they had not__________________

2. Without _________________ for so long now, we/you/I/s/he remembered instead__________

3. Say it's your house that______________, that it's you now living_______________
and...



Without color for so long now, what we remembered were monochromes, memories that tested nothing against shadows or the food of shadows, the dim.

Without color for so long, I asked for Sam's bones from a little shack like the ones in Greece where my grandmother retrieved her sister's skeleton, broken-down, washed-clean, the bones like heavy dry-cleaning dropped off some decade before and neatly-laundered, picked up again. It was the kind of dream that wouldn't stop dreaming, running itself through itself reel to reel until the real life of my rumpled bed, early morning ran into the morphine river of my day and even, after waking, the shower, caffeination, I felt the strange weight of his bones in my arms as I lugged them through Monday.

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."
T.S. Eliot

Consider that line and Modernism. How, if you think it does, does it illuminate some of the principle ideas of the movement?

Reading Assignment for Contemporary Lit.

Have the following read for class
Thursday 02/25

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

TODAY AT 11 Your Teachers Read from Their Works

Come check us out, won't you?
Canzani Auditorium

Contemporary Lit.

Tomorrow will be Intro. to Modernism. Your next reading homework will be for Thursday and posted later today. (Anthology: one place, teacher: another.)

FICTION WORKSHOPS

02/23 Tuesday Group TWO workshops. Group Three distributes.

02/24 Wed. Group TWO distributes. We workshop Sara and do an in-class assignment.

02/25 Thursday Group THREE workshops. Group Four distributes.

02/26 Friday Group TWO workshops. Group Three distributes.

Story to be Read by Wednesday/Thursday

For the Fiction Workshops:

Group One distributes stories during our next class but please, also have this piece read, printed-up and ready to discuss.

THE PLAN FOR TUESDAY CLASSES 02/16/10

Hey Gangs (Fiction, Contemporary Lit.)

I came through horrific weather to get as far as Dublin last night. The roads were the worst I have seen in my time here and the number of accidents and "derailed" vehicles, jarring. CCAD's official plans aside, I will let you know in the later on in the morning if our classes will not be taking place.
*For now, assume that they are happening according to plan.*
Even so, I may have trouble getting in as I set out. If you all get there and I am not there, for Contemp. Lit. please just sign a roll sheet and have a student plan to bring it to me on Thursday.
For Writing Fiction, Group One should plan to distribute their stories to one another and be sure to bring one in for me (and any absent students) on Thursday. Group Two should plan to distribute stories on Thursday per the original plan.
Please note W/F Writing Fiction classes have their first stories due for class distribution (22 copies stapled, edited, ready to be read and critiqued) on Wednesday 02/17 for Group One. Group Two will distribute stories on Friday.

WRITING FICTION:
As stated above, the workshops begin with distribution today and the first workshop taking place on Thursday. Group Two should plan to distribute their stories on Thursday for Tuesday workshop.

CONTEMPORARY LIT:
We'll finish up with Whitman and probably have a video. Your anthology readings will be posted next. For now, plan to get your first projects ready to turn in one week from today.

***Lit. Class Project One Due Tues. 02/23/10***
Using the epistolary form and borrowing from the style (in some way/s) from one of the people we have discussed, write a letter (or series of "postcard-shaped" paragraphs) to one of these authors. Consider their subject matter, and what, in particular, you would like to "speak back to" in their work. Example: Writing to Emily Dickinson about how one of her concepts is resonating now. (How hope gets used, misused or what it might mean to be "a thing with feathers." You might write to Whitman in Whitmanian fashion, about a place you know well.
Many possibilities.
The skinny: the piece must be at least 2 full pages or 500 words in length. It can be longer, but I don't want to see it be any skimpier than this.

FICTION WORKSHOP

The reading for Thursday and Friday's discussion and exercises has arrived. I will either get you the link for the story or distribute in class.

The assignment for your writing will be to write a story that takes place in an implausible setting.


Note: Group One for both classes, your first workshop stories will be due on Tues. and Wed. of next week (02/16 & 17) with copies enough for your entire class. Make sure it is completely ready, stapled, typed etc. at the START of class. We will workshop on Thurs. and Friday when Group Two will distribute their stories.

Whitman Poems for Contemporary Lit:

http://www.blackcatpoems.com/w/to_a_locomotive_in_winter.html
http://www.blackcatpoems.com/w/to_a_certain_cantatrice.html
http://www.blackcatpoems.com/w/a_twilight_song.html
http://www.blackcatpoems.com/w/when_lilacs_last_in_the_dooryard_bloomd.html
http://www.blackcatpoems.com/w/italian_music_in_dakota.html
http://www.blackcatpoems.com/w/i_sing_the_body_electric.html
http://www.blackcatpoems.com/w/song_of_myself.html
http://www.blackcatpoems.com/w/to_you.html

Contemporary Lit.

Here are your links for the Dickinson reading.
Bio and all Dickinson poems. (Most are short, all read through very fluidly.)http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/155

Syllabus
Fiction Workshop Weeks One-Two

T & W 01/19 & 20 In-class Writing
H & F 01/21 & 22 Assignment of Workshop Groups. Discussion about workshopping.

Weekend homework assignment. Read Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
Discussion of Hemingway to be led by Group One.
Gilman: Group Two.
http://www.moonstar.com/~acpjr/Blackboard/Common/Stories/WhiteElephants.html http://www.moonstar.com/~acpjr/Blackboard/Common/Stories/YellowPaper.html Come in with copious notes, comments, ideas about the stories. Be ready to be to engage in a lively interesting discussion about the work, the writing, the literary strategies. What works best for the story? What is not working as well?

HOMEWORK: EVERYONE. You all write a 200 word minimum letter to the writer. In it you address strengths, weaknesses, what worked, confused you, specific lines or images which you found arresting, lovely, awkward or interesting and why.

T & W 01/26 & 27 Workshops of Hemingway: GROUP ONE.

H & F 01/28 Workshop of Gilman: GROUP TWO.

WEEK TWO:

T & W 02/03 & 04 GROUP THREE WORKSHOPS
Tuesday: Poe Story
Wednesday: Oates

Homework: Read Group Four stories Ray Bradbury piece for both classes

H & F 02/04 & 05 GROUP FOUR (Bradbury both)
Homework: Read GROUP FIVE STORIES for next week
For Tues: Carver
For Wed.: Poe



Homework: THE STORY BANK IS HERE--HOW EXCITING!!!!
The next several stories will all need to be read. As the groups select their stories, I'll assign the dates to them.

Joyce Carol Oates: Where are You Going....

Edgar Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart

Lorrie Moore: People Like That....

Raymond Carver: A Small Good Thing
" " : Cathedral

Ray Bradbury: There Will Come Soft Rains
(as Group 4 opted for it in one class, if it's okay with Group 4 in both to do this one, I'd prefer that.)

Contemporary Literature Syllabus Weeks One & Two
T 01/19 In-class Writing
H 01/21 Discussion of literature. What makes it, what doesn't. Who decides.

Weekend homework assignment. (Make sure your books are ordered or located in the library. I'll check with the bookstore to see if and when copies will be coming there.)
Read Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper http://www.moonstar.com/~acpjr/Blackboard/Common/Stories/WhiteElephants.html http://www.moonstar.com/~acpjr/Blackboard/Common/Stories/YellowPaper.html Come in with copious notes, comments, ideas about the stories. Be ready to be quizzed on any aspect of the stories and barring that, to engage in a lively interesting discussion about the work, the writing, the social commentaries.
T 01/26 Discussion of Gilman

H 01/28 Discussion Hemingway.
(links or page numbers forthcoming.
Homework: Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman

Course Policy
Instructor: Sophia Kartsonis
Courses: Writing Fiction
Contemporary Literature
Email: skartsonis@ccad.edu

Textbook: Fiction Workshop: This document and its updates

Contemporary Literature: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/061853301X/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used
This should direct you to a number of inexpensive options. Be sure to order one that will ship immediatly. You are looking at around $15-20 with shipping included. (Around half of the new copies.)
I would like for everyone to have the anthology as close to February 1 as possible.

Amazon has them (used) for very little and if you order them now, you should be good to go shortly.

For now, I will post links.

Attendance: will be crucial. We will be reading a lot and dealing with that reading in class with writing assignments and activities. You will be afforded one absence for reasons I will not need to know. I do not excuse any absence after that first one and if you accrue two absences or more, I reserve the right to suggest that you drop the course.
Tardies: After two you have an absence.
Grades: You will be graded heavily on class participation and attendance. Your written work also will comprise a large percentage of your total grade. I expect lively discussions and real engagement with the topics.
For those of you in my literature course or in workshops with a reading assignment please note: I hate to resort to pop quizzes, but if during discussion it becomes apparent that a few of us have done the reading and the rest are coasting, I will administer a quiz. Assignments are due (copies, typed, all aspects of the requirements that constitute the assignment) on time at the beginning of class. Class time is not an opportunity to run around or ask me to make copies or to staple etc. We are now grown-ups. We are now grown-ups. Repeat as necessary.
YOU MUST BE HERE ON THE DAY OF YOUR HAND-OUTS, PRESENTATIONS or WORKSHOP. I cannot convey to you what it does to my mood and my soul when you are not. I usually console myself with a long session with the gradebook... I will not accept late workshop pieces. It is unfair to your group and the other groups and it makes a mess of our schedule.

The bulk of your work in my courses cannot be made-up simply by "getting the assignment." You learn from discussion. What you miss is truly lost money and effort on my part and yours. Try to remember that you're here to self-edify as well as to receive a service.
Cell Phones: Please turn them off. Brain surgery can wait.
Conferences: I am available to conference with you at any time throughout the course. Please contact me in class or through the email address and we can set a time to meet. I am required to post office hours and so I do. My preferred method of meeting with students is to know I will be meeting and to meet in a setting that resembles my idea of college: ideas exchanged over some hot beverage.

Also, if you feel confused about an assignment, let me know that before the day it is due. Come talk to me or better still, raise your hand and ask about it during class. If you miss something and then tell me you didn't understand what you were to do, you will still lose the grade. It is your responsibility to find a way to understand by letting me know that you don't.

You can email me if that is easier for you but I cannot guarantee a reply if the email is last minute. It is your responsibility to discuss any difficulties you are having or foresee well before the assignment is due.