Laura T. Smith: Teaching

Syllabus is subject to revision. Please see Daily Schedule on the course website for the most recent version.

T 1/15

Beginnings.

Th 1/17

Origins of the sonnet in English (the 16th century).
Intro to sonnets (pp. 460-462) and Wyatt, “My Galley”; Surrey, “Love, That Doth Reign and Live Within My Thought” (628); Spencer XXII; Shakespeare 1, 18, 29, 30, 55, 130 (p. 629). Also read pp. 8-15 (top). By today, also have established your website login and written your introduction on the "Introductions" forum.

T 1/22

Sonnets in the 17th through 19th centuries.
Oppenheimer, “Origins of the Sonnet” (coursepack) and Donne XIV, XVIII; Herbert, “Sin (I)”; Milton, “On His Blindness”; Wordsworth, “Scorn Not the Sonnet,” “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge”; Shelley, “Ozymandias”; Rossetti, “Remember.” Also read pp. 3-8.

Th 1/24

Sonnets in 20th century.
Yeats, “Leda and the Swan,” Frost, “Mowing,” “Acquainted with the Night” (coursepack); McKay, “The Harlem Dancer”; Millay, “Time does not bring relief, you all have lied,” “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”; Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” “Dulce et Decorum Est” (691); cummings, “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”; Cullen, “From the Dark Tower”; and in coursepack: Brooks, “kitchenette building,” “Gay Chaps at the Bar.” Also read pp. 15-21.

T 1/29

Late 20th century and contemporary sonnets.
Recitation: ________________________
Berryman, sonnet 15 (coursepack); Coleman, “American Sonnet”; Jarman, “Unholy Sonnet”; Alexie, “Sonnet: Tattoo Tears”; Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” (600); and in coursepack: Hacker, “I want this love to be resilient,” “While summer stars burn stories on the sky.” Also read pp. 21-27.

Th 1/31

Recitation: ________________________
Villanelles (pp. 489-499) and Sestinas (pp. 500-512).
Intro to villanelles (pp. 489-490) and Roethke, Bishop, Thomas; intro to sestinas (pp. 500-501) and Bishop, Ashbery, Alvarez, Rios.

T 2/5

Paper One Due.
Recitation: ________________________
Dramatic Monologues (pp. 333-372).
Intro to dramatic monologues (pp. 333-334) and Tennyson, “Ulysses”; Browning, “My Last Duchess,” “Porphyria’s Lover” (coursepack); Eliot, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”; and in coursepack Smith, “Skinhead.”

Th 2/7

Paper Return.
Recitation: ________________________
Ars Poetica: Theories of Poetry
Selections from Aristotle, Horace, Sidney, Wordsworth (all in coursepack).

T 2/12

Recitation: ________________________
Presentation: ______________________
Elegies (pp. 98-183).
Intro to Elegies (pp. 98-101) and Tichborne “Elegy”; Milton’s “Lycidas”; Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”; Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H. (selections TBA); Heaney, “Mid-Term Break”; Matthews, “An Elegy for Bob Marley”; Phillips, “As from a Quiver of Arrows” (667); and in coursepack Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died,” “Lana Turner Has Collapsed.”

Th 2/14

Poems of Love, Lust, and Longing
Recitation: ________________________
Intro to Love Poems (pp. 621-624) and Catullus, “Come Lesbia, let us live and love”; Ovid, “From Amores”; Donne, “The Flea” (824); Herrick, “Delight in Disorder”; Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” (967); Barrett Browning 13, 24 (473-4); Yeats, “No Second Troy”; Frost, “To Earthward”; Millay, “Love Is Not All: It is not meat or drink”; Levertov, “The Ache of Marriage”; Rich, “Living in Sin,” from Twenty-One Love Poems III and XIII; Dugan, “Love Song: I and Thou” (coursepack).

T 2/19

Paper One Revision Due If Required.
Recitation: ________________________
Presentation: ______________________
Romantics: Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality” (264), “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (982); Keats, “To Autumn”; Galway Kinnell, “Oatmeal” (coursepack)

Th 2/21

Recitation: ________________________
Presentation: ______________________
Arnold, “Dover Beach” (1000); Hecht, “The Dover Bitch” (1001); Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh (882).

T 2/26

Recitation: ________________________
Dickinson, “I Cannot Live With You” (641-2); and in coursepack: “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,” “Going to him—Happy Letter,” “I died for beauty”; Howe, from My Emily Dickinson. Excerpts from Open Me Carefully.

Th 2/28

Paper Two Topic Due.
Recitation: ________________________
Hopkins, “Carrion Comfort” (475), “Pied Beauty” (768), God’s Grandeur” (925), “The Windhover” (837), “No worst, there is none” (coursepack).

T 3/4

Recitation: ________________________
Eliot, from The Four Quartets (coursepack); Hejinian, from My Life (coursepack)

Th 3/6

Paper Two Complete Draft Due.
Recitation: ________________________
Peer Review and Writing Workshop Day.

T 3/11

Spring Break

Th 3/13

Spring Break

T 3/18

Paper Two Due. (You are also welcome to turn this paper in before you leave for break. Bring it to my office, PAR 406. Whenever you turn work in at my office, send an email so I know to look for it!)
Recitation: ________________________
Intro to Poetry and Politics (707-709).
Howe, “Thorow.” (coursepack)

Th 3/20

Recitation: ________________________
Presentation: ______________________
Whitman. Read Intro to Free Verse (pp. 547-550) and “Song of Myself (83); Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (798); “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (146).

T 3/25

Recitation: ________________________
Presentation: ________________________
Eliot, “The Wasteland” (coursepack).

Th 3/27

Recitation: ________________________
Presentation: ______________________
Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues” (CP); Jean Toomer, "Reapers" and “November Cotton Flower” (CP); Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel” (770)

T 4/1

Recitation: ________________________
Presentation:_______________________
Robert Frost and Maya Angelou’s inaugural poems: “The Gift Outright” (722), and in coursepack Frost, “Dedication”; Angelou, “On the Pulse of Morning”; Charles Bernstein, “Against National Poetry Month As Such” at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html or in coursepack.

Th 4/3

Recitation: ________________________
Presentation: ______________________
Ginsberg, “Howl” (574), and in coursepack “Notes for Howl and Other Poems”; Baraka, “How You Sound”; “America” (727); news coverage of Howl’s 50th anniversary (coursepack); Lorde, “Power” (734); Jordan, “Poem About My Rights” (736); Alexie, “The Powwow at the End of the World” (751)

T 4/8

Recitation: Joey
Presentation: Teresa and Elmer

Ars Poetica, Part II: Theories of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (pp. 868-913)
Parini, pp. 868-870 and Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry” (889); Marianne Moore, “Poetry” (890); cummings, “since feeling is first” (892); Hughes, “Theme for English B” (222); and in coursepack Rich, “The Roofwalker”; Paley, “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative”; Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” (coursepack) “Study of Two Pears” (coursepack); MacLeish, “Ars Poetica” (891).

Th 4/10

Recitation: Virginia
Begin Carson, Autobiography of Red, p. 21-56.

T 4/15

Recitation: Elmer
Presentation: Barbara and Carmen

Cultural Translation: Cisneros, “You Bring Out the Mexican In Me” (664); and in coursepack: Naomi Nye, “Vocabulary of Dearness,” “Steps,” “Arabic”: Ha Jin, “A Child’s Nature”; Nikki Giovanni, “Legacies.”

Th 4/17

Research Question Due. Library Research presentation by Lindsey Schell, reference librarian. In-class research work day.

T 4/22

Finish Carson, Autobiography of Red, pp. 57-146.

Th 4/24

Spoken Word Poetry and the Poetry Slam. Read Gioia, “Poetry After the Age of Print Culture” in coursepack.

T 4/29

Research Summary Due. No reading due. New Media Poetry presentation by Laura: Guillaime Apollinaire, Tom Phillips, Joseph Kosuth, Jenny Holzer, Janet Zweig, Brian Kim Stefans. Evaluations.

Th 5/1

Original Poem Due. Original Poem Reading. Course Wrap-Up.

Final Paper Due: Thursday, 5/8 by 5 pm at my office, PAR 406.