Friday, March 30, 2012

ALL STUDENTS

I would love to see you guys try your hand at this.

Advanced Creative Writing, I am going to make this one of your assignments for the poetry unit. It will be due in class on April 9--a week from this coming Monday. You will get in groups, workshop it and make it tight for the contest. Part of the assignment will be to then submit it. Start looking NOW for articles.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Syllabus Update for Honors Ekphrasis Class

SPRING BREAK

Week Ten: 03/27-29
T: Discussion of process for Cornell projects. Revisiting our imaginary artists. Add or alter three aspects of their bios. Get ready to work with them more.

H: Cornell boxes due and to be presented.
Homework: From the perspective of your imagined artist, write a letter for The Note Swap project: http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/noteswap#
Make sure to follow their guidelines.
Homework: Read all of Inflorescence. Be ready to discuss it by next week.
Week Ten: 04/03-05
T: Discussion of Sarah Hannah
H: Continued.
Homework: Come up with some way to use Hannah’s work to celebrate national poetry month. We can brainstorm various ideas in class.
Work on group project: The Puberty Doll. Consider what political and social statements your project might encounter. How to make use of these. Be ready to talk about that as a group.
Read this article and we’ll discuss the photograph and language as photograph. How does it stop time? How does it record the nothing that is not there and nothing that is. (in the words of Wallace Stevens.)

Week Eleven: 04/10-12
T: Discussion of Meitner and the way pictures operate with text and time.
H: Group Work on Film/Video Piece
Homework: after receiving your one line for the Poetry Scores project, begin to construct your piece of art for it. These will be due April 24
Read
Cezanne’s Carrot, Essay: Calm Things
Poetry month projects/Honors Symposium

Week Thirteen 4/17 4/19

T: Discussion Cezanne
H: Imaginary Artist Wikipedia page due
In class: Go to SEVERAL places on campus where there is artwork displayed and find:
1. A piece that is a work of ekphrasis in some way. Bring a title and description back to class to explain why.
2. A piece that has been influenced in some way by your imaginary artist. Get its title and description and tell us why or how. (You can incorporate this information into a later version of the wikipedia page to be displayed with your piece for the Honors show.) I understand that you will be making up the influence, but I am asking you to imagine that the work of this person has a certain voice, style, tone, themes, colors, shapes, etc. and that you can extrapolate from that to see how a piece could seem "influenced" by yours. )

Homework: Reading from Poets and Painters to be assigned in class or later today.
Week Fourteen 4/24 4/26
T: Presentation of Poetry Score Project
H: TBA
Week Fifteen 5/1- 5/3
T: TBA
H: Final Project Presentations

Week Sixteen
5/8- 5/10 TBA (likely a film)

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Contemporary Literature

Tuesday: Discussion of Modernism. Finish with Stevens, start Eliot, Williams

Readings:
T.S. Eliot
William Carlos Williams (bio & poems)
Marianne Moore (bio & poems)
Elizabeth Bishop (bio & poems)



Thursday Discussion of readings
Homework: Read Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin
And White Angel by Michael Cunningham
To Robby by John Edgar Wideman

Week of April 3

Tuesday: Discussion of readings.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Advanced Creative Writing Reminder

Tomorrow is the final visiting writer. I have a health insurance meeting to attend and will likely be late, but I will be there and would like to see all of you there.

Remember that we will be writing letters to each of our writers being workshopped for this week and for last. Writers, I will expect you to keep track of the notes you receive.

Also, I want to be sure that these workshops are giving you all that you need from them. In the interest of dong that, I will be asking that there be a designated scribe for each person being workshopped. This person will note what is being said during your workshop and will note ALL that he or she is able to capture (or quickly summarize) of the conversation.

It has been my experience that we all experience something that I call "workshop ears" during our own workshops and that leads us to hear all of the negative comments only, even neutral comments become negative comments and constructive criticism gets heard as mere criticism. We rarely hear the good things and tune in very closely to those things that we hear as harsh or negative. I want to be sure that we serve one another well by noting all that is good and accomplished as well as what might need to be reconsidered.

Beyond any of that, the most valuable thing you can learn from how a roomful of readers, each with very distinct libraries, read you is that only some of them will ever be your kind of reader. That doesn't mean that there is no value in being read by those who read other types of things. It means that you get a variety of vantage points and those are always valuable, even if only to show you how ONE person might read what you wrote.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Adv. Creative Writing Workshop Schedule--UPDATED

This week: February 27
Workshop: M. Nemeth, the Mikes
Distribution: D. Law,
C. Cimoroni, L. Sah, E. Vest

Week of March 5
Workshop: Law, Cimoroni, Sah, Vest
Distribution : S. Diesel, A. Lake

Week of March 12
Workshop: Diesel, Lake
Distribution:A. McCulloch, P. Gaither, C. McDonnell

Plus, read all of the remaining pages of Making Shapely Fiction and be ready to discuss them. AND don't forget the new policy on workshops: you must write a 250 word minimum "letter" to the author of the piece. Authors: please email me a roll sheet after your own workshop and let me know how many stories came back, which people wrote the letters and how useful or plentiful were the comments. Remember that your grade is contingent upon your work as an editor as well as a writer.

Homework: Regardless of your workshop status, please do one page each of the following:
1. Choose three chapters from your book (Stern) and write a minimum of one page for EACH of brand new writing that employs the main advice from each chapter.

Week of March 19--SPRING BREAK
March 26
Workshop: McCulloch, Gaither, McDonnell
Homework: Intro to Poetry. Reading:

ALL STUDENTS VERY URGENT

Hey Gang,

I am asking a big favor, something that you can do quickly but something that also must be done right away.
A poet and professor whom many of us loved and admired is being remembered in an indie film that someone is trying to make. Today. Monday over at Kickstart, votes are being gathered until 11:00 a.m. PLEASE kindly vote and get everyone you know to do so, as well. It would mean so much to get this film made and to be able to use it to teach this incredible poet's inspiring work.

Thanks so much.

Your Grateful Teacher

Friday, March 9, 2012

Ekphrasis

Reading assignment:

Read ALL of Dimestore Alchemy and this brief piece about poets and painters.

Contemporary Lit. Gang, Here's Your Homework

Read this Brief Guide to Modernism and all of the biography of Wallace Stevens and be QUIZ-ready for Tuesday.
And this


Also, I think I hear a little Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock influence in this poem. A free absence (or forgiven absence) to the first person able to tell me where).



BTW,(see, I can text-speak and still swing an apostrophe)
I am loving your formal poems, You Shy Things.


I haven't posted this lately, so I will now. A gorgeous response poem and a reminder why you should never ask this question this way of your college professors. :-)

Did I Miss Anything?
Tom Wayman

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people
on earth.

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Kartsonis All Classes: Visiting Artist Dates for Our Classes

The three dates below should be noted as those particularly valuable and important to your classes. The visiting artist series is superb and is something you should avail yourselves of as it is one of the many privileges of being in school and immersed in intriguing conversations. But, in particular, and pertaining to language and literature, the three listed below are mandatory to my classes. If you have a scheduling conflict or some other reason for which attendance will be difficult, please let me know. Otherwise, plan ahead and get to these. I have seen and heard all of them read and and read their work and they are an exceptional line-up.

Monday February 2711:00 AM – 12:20 PM
Joseph V. Canzani Auditorium
Free and Open to the Public

Charlene Fix, professor, chair, English and Philosophy, teaches writing, literature, poetry, and film and literature. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Ohio Review, The Chicago Review, The Manhattan Review, and Negative Capability. She has received fellowships for her poetry from both the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the Ohio Arts Council, and won the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has published a chapbook of poems, Mischief (Pudding House Publications), and a poetry collection, Flowering Bruno: A Dography, a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry (XOXOX Press). BS, MA, The Ohio State University.

Charlene will share highlights from "Harpo Marx as Trickster: Why We Love Him, Why We Laugh at Him, Why He Seems Divine," complete with film clips, stills, anecdotes, and few poems (her own and others) analyzing and celebrating this 20th century and beyond manifestation of the trickster archetype. With his cohorts Groucho and Chico, Harpo destabilizes power and cleanses institutions. But only Harpo exhibits the full range and multiplicity of trickster traits. Trickster tales arc between disorder and balance, passing through chaos as do the Marx Brothers’ films, with Harpo’s tantalizing complexity at the heart of the disruption.
----------------------------------
Matt Hart
Poet
Monday, March 5, 2012.
11:00 AM – 12:20 PM
Joseph V. Canzani Auditorium
Free and Open to the Public

Matt Hart is the author of three books of poetry: Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006), Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS, 2010), and Light-Headed (BlazeVOX, 2011), as well as several chapbooks. A fourth full-length collection, Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless, will be published by Typecast in 2012. His poems and reviews have been widely published, and he's received fellowships from both the Breadloaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. In 2010 he was chosen by the University of Iowa's International Writing Program and the U.S. State Department to participate in the Life of Discovery exchange program in China.
Hart has performed his poems nationwide. He is also a musician and songwriter whose music has been featured in major motion pictures and on MTV. In 1996, he cofounded Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industiral Safety, which Poets & Writers magazine called one of the most innovative small press magazines in the country. He is the Art Academy of Cincinnati's Poet-in-Resistance.

Here are some links for you to have a look at in reference to Matt Hart: (I didn't hotlink them, so you'll have to cut and paste them in.)

www.artacademy.edu/academics_and_programs/faculty/matt-hart.php

bigbigmess.tumblr.com/post/9810232520/wrecking-ball-made-man-matt-hart-reads-a-new-poem

www.versedaily.org/2008/aboutmattharthr.shtml
-----------------------------
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Monday March 26, 2012.
11:00 AM – 12:20 PM
Joseph V. Canzani Auditorium
Free and Open to the Public

Aimee’s newest collection, Lucky Fish, was just released from Tupelo Press and was recently featured in The New York Times. Poems from this collection were awarded a 2009 NEA Fellowship in poetry, the Glenna Luschia Prize from Prairie Schooner, and the Angoff Award from The Literary Review for the best poems appearing that volume year.

Some background info: At the Drive-In Volcano (Tupelo Press), her second book of poetry, was named the winner of the Balcones Prize, which honors an outstanding collection published the previous year (2007). Finalists for this award included Bob Hicok, Laura Kasischke, and Ron Padgett. My first collection of poetry, Miracle Fruit, was selected by Gregory Orr for the Tupelo Press Prize and was the winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award in poetry, the Global Filipino Literary Award. Other awards include a Pushcart Prize, a poetry fellowship to the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah and the Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest.