General Requirements:

• Journal Roundtable
• Memorizations (April 26)
• Participation in final reading and potluck (April 30)

Required Items for the Portfolio (please put in an accordion folder w/ clasp):

• Chapbook, three copies minimum (staple bound or saddle stitched; one for me to keep, one for you to keep, one to give away; NOTE: I will not respond to your chapbook with comments unless you ask for comments in writing)
• Introduction (may be in chapbook itself or given as a writer’s memo)
• Electronic copy of chapbook manuscript (e-mail to cshalle at ilstu dot edu)
• Book Review (500-1000 words (approximate); published or sent for publication; alert me via e-mail where you have sent it or where it may be found)
• Poetry Journal Submission (turn in hard copy to me and I’ll mail it OR bcc me on e-mail sub)
• Journal (Evidence of habitual writing practice: may be a journal, comp book, notebook, sketch book, blog link, word folder/winzip folder, Google doc, etc.; please let me know if you want it returned)
• End of Semester Questionnaire (see below)
• Writer’s Inventory / Writer’s Inventory Redux (see below)

Optional Item:

• Grade letter & grade meeting (This is a chance to state in writing what you feel your letter grade for the course should be. Please include detailed, specific descriptions referring to course assignments and the syllabus. I would advise writing the letter if you have excessive absences, missed deadlines, or assignments.)

End-of-Semester Questionnaire

Directions: Copy and paste this questionnaire into a new MS Word document or blog post.  Please answer the following questions as honestly and in as much detail as possible.  Your thoughts and suggestions will aid me as I revise the course to teach it again in the future. Please note you may turn this into me after May 11 if you feel it will interfere with your grade.

1. What was your favorite writing assignment? Why?
2. What was  your least favorite writing assignment? Why?
3. Discuss your reactions to full-group workshops. Would you change them in any way?
4. Discuss your reactions to small-group workshops. Would you change them in any way?
5. Did the overall course structure (two portfolios, emphasis on invention before revision, arrangement, delivery) helpeyour writing practice?
6. Do you feel you learned enough about writing poetry, including craft issues, contemporary trends, etc.? Please explain.
7. Did keeping a journal and/or blog help your writing practice? Explain.
8. Did you like the format of reading one example of contemporary poetry (Gurlesque) in depth or would you prefer more of a survey of poetry? Explain your answer.
9. Do you feel the Reading the Gurlesque reading blog enhanced or extended discussions? Why or why not?
10. Discuss my performance as an instructor. Did you find the way the course was conducted satisfactory? Would you have liked the instruction to be different? Explain.
11. Please offer advice or helpful hints for students taking this course in the future.

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I often use writing samples from past students as models in my classroom.  Please check one of the boxes and type in your name and today’s date below:

__ I give you permission to use writing samples from my English 247.01 portfolio

__  I do not give you permission to use writing samples from my English 247.01 portfolio

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Date:

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Writer’s Inventory Redux

Please complete this without looking at the version you did early in the semester. Turn in a copy of both in your portfolio.

1. If you had to describe poetry to an eight-year-old, how would you do it? What would you say or do?
2. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?
3. What is a poet? What is the poet’s role in our contemporary society? Are poets regular people or different? Explain.
4. What is the Gurlesque?
5. How do you plan on engaging with poetry after this class?
6. What is a long-term or lifetime goal you hope to accomplish related to writing or poetry?

One of the spoils of this year’s AWP was MAKE Magazine, a Chicago-based publication that publishes new nonfiction, fiction, poetry, interviews, reviews, visual art, and a section called “On the Make,” a nod to Nelson Algen and a link between the print version of MAKE with its online counterpart. MAKE’s title also reflects poetics, the theory of making, and the literature, art, and hybird work found in the issue I examined are aware of artifice.

I noticed two things before I read a word: MAKE looks good. MAKE even smells good. The cover features a quote from Jenny Boully’s nonfiction piece “If you point to heaven, it begins.” integrated into multicolored brushstrokes. Since the magazine is as much about the integration of art and literature with design, the cover works to prepare readers for that. The journal’s title and information is relegated to the far right-hand corner of the cover.

The theme for the Spring/Summer 2010 MAKE is Myth, Magic, and Ritual. I like literary magazines that posit a theme for each issue, as it usually provides either a point of coherence or dissonance as I work my way through (It also make me rethink my own work as I prepare to submit).

As for the issue’s content, I was drawn immediately to Kate Zambreno’s nonfiction piece “Slapping Clark Gable.” I’d been following Kate’s blog Frances Farmer is My Sister for a while (especially interested in her theory of anorexic and bulimic writing) and connected with her at the AWP (the Les Figues/Chiasmus/Fairy Tale Review readings at Thin Man in Denver was worth the trip alone and Zambreno’s reading mesmerized me: raw and invested in themes my work returns to like religion and sexuality).

“Slapping Clark Gable” is nonfiction in the lineage of confessional writing (see especially Plath) and excess, informed by Zambreno’s fave theorists like Artaud, Bataille, etc. It is bald, sexual, shockingly honest:

Although I would be a virgin until twenty, I began masturbating furiously at a young age. I would lie on my belly and rub my fingers against my underwear. I needed friction to get off (still do). I know what you’re doing, my mother once said from the foot of the stairs as I pretended to watch TV. This best sums up the exchanges I had with my mother about sex. The implication of surveillance, the undertones of guilt.

After the aforementioned reading at AWP, I told Kate in passing that she was my unofficial autobiographer, based on the excerpt she read from her Chiasmus novel O Fallen Angel. Devouring passages like the above on the plane home from Denver just reiterated that compliment. Although my parents were not quite as panopticonic as Zambreno’s mother described above, I felt the pressure to behave (whatever that means) and succeed (whatever that means), which are as much about my Catholic upbringing as a dissonant counterpoint to my own oxymoronic flaw of perfectionism. Zambreno captures these notes perfectly here, hinting at the roots of her attraction to the taboo, to stoically brutal lovers. I think of my own attractions to junk, ruin(s), tabloids, and garbage. A great read.

MAKE also makes an investment in visual poetry, publishing the collage work of Brandon Downing, whose Lake Antiquity, just out from Fence Books looks beautiful and kitschy (in a good way!). I was more taken, however, with the excavatory poetry of Nate Zoba. “Recrement” is the example of Zoba’s work here, and it coincides with the idea of MAKE being about poetics and especially with the ritual act that excavating a book must be. Zoba’s work forces me to reckon with it as a visual artifact before getting at it as a poem. It looks like no other poem I’ve seen (although Tom Phillips A HUMUMENT comes to mind for both Downing Zoba’s poetry) with its webbed projective verse. The pages become webs that link the word selected by Zoba, given depth by the object of the book itself. MAKE is one of only a handful of journals (Poets & Artists (O&S) being another) that could pull off publishing visual work like this with its full-color matte pages and large size.

MAKE features plenty of other writers I’m interested in, including Nick Demske, Cathy Park Hong, Dara Wier, Lily Hoang, and Kathleen Rooney, mixed with writers whose work I’m seeing for the first time. MAKE is a sexy journal that seems committed to publishing challenging work.

Confession in poetry is difficult because it puts your subjectivity at risk and may be too personally revealing or infringe upon familial or other close relationships. Yet the impulse is there to make that personal wager when we write. It is possible, however, to encode the things we want (but fear) to write. Literary critic George Steiner calls this encoding the tactical difficulty, and it applies to writers who needed to encode their writing for fear of real political reprisals like imprisonment, exile, torture, or death (Russian writers after the revolution are the examples Steiner uses, but all people who are discriminated against write liberatory verse using code, see Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly as one example).

An example of a poem that uses the tactical difficulty to hide personal details in plain sight is Richard Hugo’s “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir.” The content of the poem is not new, written out of the end of a relationship that ended, in which the scorned lover imagines a trauma befalling the other or commiting one himself. By using the tactical difficulty, including sound-driven composition and parataxis (elimination of conjunctions), the awful psychological anger the speaker of the poem feels does not reveal itself easily and reads as enstranged or defamiliarized. The poem becomes the vehicle for the hurt and angst the speaker/poet felt and allows a creation of stasis that does not exist in reality. The poem turns into an examination of the speaker’s own cowardice, gender expectation for his behavior, and vague hope of his anger and lack becoming something nourishing by way of the other, who becomes fantastically deified in the images at end of the poem. (Consider “Kicking Horse” in contrast with Stanley Kunitz’s “The Portrait.”)

Write a poem or notes for a poem that discusses a certain situation that always seems to come up in your writing but contains some elements that might be too revealing if put into the poem as is. Try to use sound work, images, metaphor/allegory, or paratactic constructions to become code so that your secret can hide in the plain sight of the poem.

Rationale: A comment I’ve found myself making quite frequently in workshops concerns what is wagered or risked in poems. The workshop presents a difficult public space in which writers have to work because it is not easy to take risks and wager more in poems that will be scrutinized. Since the workshop portion of this class ends today, I’d like you to try writing a poem that uses the tactical difficulty to hide a secret in plain sight or even one that confesses something directly. Are you a perpetrator? A victim? Is there something you perceive about yourself that alienates you from others?

As a writer, it is important to realize that no one ever has to read a poem but you. You can write it and destroy it. Thinking about audience is useful, sure, but that doesn’t have to happen at the invention stage of writing. I have found that the things we think are serious or personal don’t go away; important parts of our lives haunt us and with good reason: they are the formative events that make us who we are. While I don’t expressly believe that poetry is only for therapeutic purposes, I do believe that the cognitive effort we put into writing can be cathartic and helpful, a way to think through or wrestle with ourselves.

For Later: Keep working on wagering more and more in your poems.

As you know from the midterm portfolio experience, considering works in relation to one another is much different from considering them as independent texts. How will this group of texts communicate with each other?

While brainstorming, I came up with a number of ways that I think about arranging a body of works, a taxonomy of literary arrangements. I categorize the arrangment strategies as either pragmatic or aesthetic, although there may be other categories that can be separated out from these. Arrangment techniques function for collections of poems, stories, plays, or essays as well as anthologies, journals, and textbooks, etc.

Pragmatic

• alphabetic: arrangement by name, typically the author’s
• genre: in a multigenre work, things may be arranged by the genre classification
• rank/cachet: by perceived importance
• chronological: arranged by a strict date order
• historical/periodical: grouping works together by literary period or school i.e. Victorian, Postmodern
• geographic: by location
• race
• class
• gender
• sexuality
• ability
• age
• mode/media: technological mode of production used to arrange i.e. oral traditions separated from printed separated from hypertextual, etc.
• stylistic: the ways an author or authors use language

Aesthetic

• melodic: a musical grouping intending to achieve beauty
• communicative: a grouping devised so that the pieces speak to one another (also: conversational, dialogic)
• juxtapositional: a grouping strategy that puts unlike pieces together to create a jarring, surprising effect (also: dialectical arrangement)
• rhetorical: uses pieces in a tactical way to make a larger argument or persuade
• harmonic: uses pieces in unison like a chord blends notes on a piano or guitar
• dissonant: uses pieces in unresolved, indeterminate, or discordant ways to create an effect, often confusion or displeasure
• collagic: applies the tenets of collage or cut-up; often shows the rough edges and “tape” between pieces in an arrangement
• narrative (master/meta): using small pieces to tell a larger story, think chapters in a book or sections in a longer poem or interrelated short stories or poems in a collection or journal
• confrontational: an arrangement in which the pieces are at war with one another or the audience
• hybrid: an arrangement based on blending, either of different genres or of different arrangement styles
• interactive/hypertextual: an arrangement style that allows the audience freedom when interacting with the work (difficult to do in print medium although not impossible)
• logical/mathematical: using classical logic or numerical formulas to dictate arrangements of works e.g. Fibonacci sequences, if/then, syllogisms, etc.
• chance/indeterminate/constraint-based: using a devised process of operations to dictate arrangement e.g. dice, I Ching hexagrams, coins, Tarot cards, etc.

Week Thirteen

M 4/12 Arranging Poems in a Sequence

Readings

• none

Deadlines

• book review due (if you want edits before submitting for publication)
• think about what poems from the Gurlesque you would include in an anthology

In-class

• create Gurlesque anthology and put poems in order

W 4/14

Readings

• TBA

Deadlines

• bring in arranged copy of portfolio poems for final edits and proofreading exchange
• Read an issue and prepare a brief presentation on a contemporary poetry journal (resources)

In-class

• Talk about submitting work to professional publications (reviews, creative work)
• Poetry Journal roundtable discussion
• small group workshop #6 (end of small-group workshop cycle)

Week Fourteen

M 4/19 Chapbook Planning & Making

Readings

• Noah Eli Gordon “Considering Chapbooks: A History of the Little Book”
• Poets & Writers “DIY: How to Make a Saddle-Stitched Chapbook”

Deadlines

• read and proofread the portfolio you were given

In-class

• writing activity
• storyboarding, planning, and making a chapbook
• finish roundtable discussion, if necessary

W 4/21 Reading Poetry Out Loud

Readings

• TBA

Deadlines

• return edited portfolio drafts

In-class

• discussion of reading styles and the difference between page and oral delivery
• plan potluck for last class

Week Fifteen

M 4/26

Readings Sharing Memorizations

• TBA

Deadlines

• recite and transcribe memorized poems (last day to recite/transcribe)

In-class

• recite memorized poems aloud
• transcribe poems by hand

W 4/28

Readings Sharing Your Work

• TBA

Deadlines

• end of semester materials due by Friday, May 7
  

In-class

• Class reading and potluck

FINALS WEEK BEGINS MAY 3

Today’s exercise relates to antin’s idea of a talk poem as well as other contemporary genres like freestyle hip-hop, but we will be using talk as a way to invent a poem on the spot, which can be used later to create a text as antin does. Consider the exercise today a kind of performative invention.

1. You will be inventing your talk piece on the spot with your small group.
2. Draw a notecard. The notecard will have a classic poetic topic on it, which will be the focus of your talk poem. Do not reveal the topic to your group mates.
3. Briefly meditate on the topic (no longer than 30 seconds). Once you have a coherent thought about it, begin talking and carry it out as long as you can. Try to go at least two minutes.
4. While you talk, try to charge what you say with poetic devices like imagery, metaphors, similes, rhymes, associations whatever fits. Using narrative is fine, but make your talk poemy.
5. The rest of your group mates (your audience) will take notes on your talk. They can try to write what you say verbatim, write the best lines or ideas, and/or the associations they make while the piece is going on. They will hand this over to the talker when they are done.
6. Repeat the cycle until each group mate has invented a poem by talking it.

Rationale: This exercise is really meant to take you out of the comfort zone, so that you can view poetry as something that has a real audience, a performance. When we write poems for the page, the audience is often amporphous, abstract, or irrelevant. But in this exerice they are right there and you have to take that into account. Inventing a poem on the spot is really a brainstorming technique akin to a freewrite or an extemporaneous speech in communications class. After the exercise, think about the difference between having to talk a poem to an audience and writing a poem on the page. How can this information help you as a writer?

This can be good practice is how to write poems that sound “talky.” It can also be a good way to try out a persona or a certain kind of voice. It can teach you about breath and guide your lineation.

If you are interested in performance poetry or spoken word as your main way of creating poetry, it makes a lot of sense to invent poems like this, and you might want to buy a recorder or download Audacity (a free audio application that you can use a microphone to interact with) to add this to your inventive repetoire.

Using rote task time to invent poems auditorily is also a good plan (think car trips or showers). These tasks allow us extra time to “write” that is otherwise lost.

For later: I recommend using the notes you are given in combination with the memory of giving the talk to create a written poem or a spoken-word poem. Or you can find a new thread in the notes or your memory and use the raw material as a way to invent or add to an existing piece.

One of my favorite poems I’ve written was inspired by the tabloids. My Grandma used to have my Mom and Grandpa pick up Star Magazine for her while they shopped. I remember being drawn to the “what people are wearing section.” From these investigations, I learned the word “frumpy,” which made it all worthwhile. In “supermarket tabloid tableau,” I revisit the supermarket as a place where fashion imagery and disposable art surround.

This exercise, then, engages with the idea of fashion as the ongoing theory of the new, a means to dress bodies (both human and the body of the poem, and the zeitgeist or spirit of the moment. For this exercise, we will be thinking about how fashion and appropriation of kitsch and pop culture can be used to create a poem specifically for our moment. Here are a couple ideas:

• use fashion words and lingo blended with the content of the poem: appropriate language from Star Magazine, TMZ, fashion.net, style.com, or NYT Fashion & Style
• write a poem that builds an impossible, Rube Goldberg-esque outfit; try to include imagery from all five senses (like Chelsey Minnis’s “Foxina”)
• write a ten-line poem of your choosing and invent a formal fashion to dress it up (like Chelsey Minnis’s ellipses)
• create a poem that uses fashion to experiment with gender norms or heteronormativity, a carnivalesque poem where no one is wearing what they *should*be wearing

Rationale: Many contemporary poets say that the essential thematic and/or emotional content of poetry does not change. One crises of modernism lamented was the loss of shared referents between the poet and the reader (classical myths, the bible, etc.). Ron Silliman questions the use of timely specifics in this blog post on Aaron Belz from 2005. Participating in an exercise like this/these forces us to wrestle with the question of whether poetry can be timeless and timely simultaneously, or whether we should even have to take sides. In the digital age, contingent information is a few keystrokes away in most cases, so why not add referents? It is a way to enhance the strata of information a poem can include.

Taking on these questions also engages with another big question: do we accept the full spectrum of different poetries: speech, writing, and digital? Or are we only willing to call poetry what we judge as aesthetically superior? Is there really a difference (other than exclusionary elitism) between a person who writes poems and a poet?

For Later: Specificity and pop intertextuality is contagious and fun because it allows us to combine the serious play of poetry with our guilty pleasures: tabloids, reality television, douchebags, tools, texts, and tweets. Use these exercises to begin a series or add the formal fashion device you created to other poems and test the reaction to them in workshops and submissions to journals.

Minky Momo’s Gamine Morphosis from Josef Horáček on Vimeo.

Notes on Women and the Grotesque in Action Yes!

In a sort-of homage to Chelsey Minnis’s Bad Bad (e.g. “Mildred” or “Foxina”), we will be taking a look at a specific kind of repetition exercise today.

Your task is to create a short poem or, even better in my opinion, a prose poem in which each line uses a word from the previous line. While you work through, you should pause after each line to look up the lexical words from the previous line here or here to get ideas about the direction your should head. Move more slowly than you normally would and let yourself and your poem get carried away by language’s interconnectedness. Feel free to borrow a sentence from somewhere else to begin the activity.

Rationale: It is not natural to write this way, which for me is reason enough to try it. It will certainly slow down your composition and let you build the poem from inside the langauge rather than from your own associative idea chains. This can be a habit-busting exercise if you feel like you are in a rut.

This is also the kind of exercise that lends itself to composition on the computer, rather than long-hand writing with a pen or pencil. I find my compositional style when working directly on the computer to be much more recursive and much more full of pauses to look things up. The internet is a world of useful distractions that can be incorporated into the poem.

For Later: Using the internet’s possibility for contingency and look-up-ability can be a great revision strategy, and you can revise other compositions by following parts of it that surprise you, like a word intruding that you didn’t know you knew. Find out what it means and check it’s etymology. An interesting revision or new direction might present itself that you could not have consciously made.

NOTE: This exercise is adapted from Brian Kiteley’s The 3 A.M. Epiphany.

WINNERS will be published in the anthology. Each will receive a copy of the full-color book published by Jaded Ibis Press and distributed through Amazon.com, Jaded Ibis Productions, and other literary distribution channels (TBA). One Editor’s Choice Award receives $100.00. Press releases listing each winner’s name, academic major and school will be sent to print and digital U.S. newspapers, magazines and other media outlets, and posted on the website.

2010 GUEST EDITOR: Doug Rice is the author of four innovative works of prose and Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento. He specializes in Critical Theory, Film Theory and Culture, Fiction Writing, Memoir, and Contemporary American Literature.

COMPLETE GUIDELINES: http://jadedibisproductions.com/platypus_prize.html