Daily Schedule
"Penguin"= The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, ed. Levin. All poems for Weeks 1-4 are here unless marked.
"CP"= Coursepack.
I. Formal Approaches
Week 1: Beginnings
Aug 30
Introductions. Policies. Opening exercise.
Week 2: The Sonnet/Introduction to Prosody
Sept 4
Claude McKay, “The Harlem Dancer”; Edna St. Vincent Millay, “What lips my lips have kissed”; Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”; Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”; Frost, “Acquainted With the Night”
Prosody Reading: Parini pp. 8-15, top (xerox)
Terms: sonnet, meter, line, foot, stanza, iamb, pentameter, scansion. Also: stanza forms (octave, sestet, quatrain, couplet), rhyme schemes.
Sept 6
Oppenheimer, "The Origin of the Sonnet" (xerox)
Sonnet cut-ups
Week 3: The Sonnet Tradition
Sept 11
Wyatt, “Farewell, Love, and all they lawes for ever,” "My Gally, Charged With Forgetfulness," “I find no peace, and all my war is done”; Surrey, “The soote season, that bud and blome furth bringes,” “Love that liveth and reigneth in my thought”; Shakespeare, “From Romeo and Juliet [Act I, Scene V], Sonnets 18, 55, 60, 73, 116, 130, 147. John Berryman, sonnet 15.
Prosody reading: Parini pp. 3-8, 460-462 (xerox)
Terms: courtly love, Petrarchan sonnet, volta, emjambment, end-stopped lines, substitutions, figurative language/rhetorical figures.
Sept 13
Donne, Holy Sonnets 1, 6, 10, 14, 18; Herbert, “Two Sonnets Sent To His Mother, New Year 1609/10”; Milton, "When I consider how my light is spent"; Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” “No worst, there is none,” “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee”; Jarman, “Unholy Sonnet” (xerox)
Prosody: Parini pp. 15-21 (xerox)
Terms: sprung rhythm, curtal
Week 4: Sonnet Traditions
Sept 18:
Wordsworth, “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,” “Scorn Not the Sonnet,” “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”; Shelley, “Ozymandias”; Keats, “If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d”; Millay, “I Will Contain Chaos”; Emma Lazarus, “The New Collossus”; Hacker, “I want this love to be resilient” and “While summer stars burn stories on the sky” from Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (xerox)
Sept 20: The Sonnet?/Pushing the Boundaries
Yeats, “A Crazed Girl,” Brooks, “kitchenette building,” (CP) “Gay Chaps at the Bar”; cummings, TBD; Rich, from Contradictions 1, 18 and “Final Notations”; Alexie, “Sonnet: Tattoo Tears” (CP)
Terms: Blank verse, slant rhyme, sight rhyme, internal rhyme
Week 5
Sept 25 Test: Prosody and the Sonnet
II. Poetics in Context: Historical Approaches
Sept 27: Form and Historical Context: Revolutionary Poetics
Recitations: Sam, Liz, Calvin
Read, "The Romantic Period," Wordsworth's “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” and “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
Week 6: Form and Context: Revolutionary Poetics
Oct 2
Presentation: Amy and Meggie
Recitations: Sabrina, John, Blake
Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”; Coleridge, "Kubla Khan"; Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn”
Terms: ode
Oct 4
Presentation: Sabrina and John
Recitations: Steve, Erica, Imaad
Whitman, from Leaves of Grass (1855 version)
terms: extensive poetics
Week 7: Form and Context: Problems of Modernism(s)
Oct 9
Presentation: Calvin and Steve
Recitations: Ryan, Veronica, Meggie
Dickinson, "There's a certain Slant of light," "My life had stood a loaded gun," "I'm ceded--I've stopped being theirs," "If you were coming in the fall," "I cannot live with you," "Going to him--Happy Letter," "I died for beauty"; Howe, from My Emily Dickinson, available here.
terms: intensive poetics
Oct 11
Presentation: Lea and Sam
Recitations: Courtney, Paulina, Anna
Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," “The Wasteland,” “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
Week 8: Poetics of Historical Subjectivity
Oct 16
Presentation: Paulina and Courtney
Recitations: Drew, Lea, Amy
Other Modernisms: Marianne Moore: "Poetry"; Williams, "To Elsie," "Spring and all"; Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues," Jean Toomer, "November Cotton Flower"
Oct 18
Presentation: Imaad, Liz, Anna
Recitations: Eric, Shawn, Emily
Susan Howe, from “Thorow”
III. Poetry and the Stakes of Representation
Week 9: What Are the Stakes of Writing Poetry?
Oct 23
Paper One Due
Presentation: Emily, Erica
Hughes, “Theme for English B”; Rich, “The Roofwalker”; Eliot, from The Four Quartets; Stevens, “On Modern Poetry”; Paley, “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative”; Robert Frost, "Dedication" (poem for John F. Kennedy's inauguration, available here)
Oct 25
Presentation: Eric and Veronica
Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” "Study of Two Pears"; Perelman, “The Future of Memory”
Week 10: Making American Language
Oct 30
Stein, from Tender Buttons
Nov 1
Presentation: Ryan and Drew
Ginsberg, “Howl,” “Notes for Howl and Other Poems”; Baraka, “How You Sound”
Week 11: Representing the Self: Memory, Identity, and Writing
Nov 6
Writing Workshop Day. Bring a revised draft.
Nov 8
Paper One Revision Due.
Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”; Nikki Giovanni, "Legacies";
Joan Retallack, excerpt from "After-Images"; Lyn Hejinian, excerpt from My Life
Week 12: Identity, Memory, Translating the Self
Nov 13
Presentation: Shawn and Blake
Frank O'Hara, Patrick Rosal, Li-Young Li; from Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
Nov 15
Original Poems Due: In-class reading.
IV. Making Contemporary Poetries
Week 13: Poetry After Print Culture (cont.)
Nov 20
Read Gioia, "Poetry After the Age of Print Culture." Discuss Slam.
Nov 22
Week 14: Contemporary Epic/Hybrid Writing
Nov 27
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (pp. 21-146)
Nov 29
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Week 15: Visual Poetics, Hypermedia Poetics
Dec 4
Guillaime Apollinaire, Cecilia Vicuna, Tom Phillips, Johanna Drucker, Edwin Torres, Joseph Kosuth, Jenny Holzer, Janet Zweig, Brian Kim Stefans, Jena Osman. Evaluations.
Dec 6
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