Spring

Is there a place for poetry in a society in which reading has been declared dead-where at the very least, reading threatens to be eclipsed by scanning? In this workshop/laboratory, we will explore material whose response is a delirious yes-poetry that revels in charging the confines of the page and book. Exposure to an archive of modernist and contemporary visual and sound poetry, artists' books, contemporary installation and performance works, and relevant theories of media dislodgment will help us compose our own answers to the (old) question: what forms are poems obliged or inspired to take as language goes viral, in the face of total information, digitization, and post-literary culture? Readings and viewings in 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, visits to local writing-arts collections, and class visits by local artists will help us generate our own works. Students will complete weekly assignments across media, and engage with the writing of their peers formally, while working toward a culminating piece in a medium of their choice: this final piece can take the form of a chapbook, performance, installation, or other pertinent channel. Works studied may include the envelope poems of Emily Dickinson, a range of mid-century concrete poems, DICTEE (by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicu-a, the "total translations" of Jerome Rothenberg, Drift (by Caroline Bergvall), the art of Etel Adnan and Barbara Kruger, performances, texts, and graphic work by Edwin Torres, The Jew's Daughter (by Judd Morrissey), the instagram feeds of Shelley Jackson, and more.

"It is difficult / to get the news from poems," Williams wrote in 1955, yet American poetry has demonstrated since its inception a fascination with public events and how poetry itself might respond to, even intervene in, those events. This course will explore the genre of the "public" poem, a poem shaped by-registering, responding to, remonstrating against-public phenomena, and one which locates the poetic "self" within a wider social newsscape. On the premise that creative work is socially produced, and that the best training for a writer, therefore, is to read extensively, we will examine an eclectic range of contemporary "public" poetry-Peter Balakian, Quan Barry, Joshua Clover, Martha Collins, Tyehimba Jess, Jill McDonaugh, Gregory Pardlo, Anne Winters-and engage pressing questions in historical and contemporary poetics. We will also, of course, produce, share, and workshop a significant body of our own "public" poetry. What, we will ask, makes a poem of its moment but not momentary? How is "public" poetry different from "political" poetry? Incorporating basic and advanced issues in poetic craft-open form, braided narratives, the ethics of witness-as well as attendance at poetry readings and some critical writing, the course will ultimately help us find and sharpen those techniques necessary to write our keenest, most urgent poetry. We will write, then, not only about public history, but into it.

In this advanced writing workshop students will write two short stories and revise one. The workshop will focus on traditional aspects of craft while the short writing and reading assignments will focus on various writing processes. We will learn through practice how different writing approaches utilize or ameliorate the vital power of the ego. "Ego" is self: ourselves and our own experiences are vital for writing fiction with authenticity. But ego can also get in the way of creation and foment fear and pretension. Reading modern short stories by Alice Walker, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami and Lan Samantha Chang among others, we will look at "ego" as a function of characterization and the self in fiction. We'll read essays by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung on "Active Imagination," theories of automatic writing by Beat poets, and ideas of writing pedagogy by Peter Elbow and will question how and why calibrating ego is essential for authors and characters, and when ego can detract from the power of the imaginary world and "first thoughts."

This course is for students with works-in-progress, whether a story collection or a novel, who feel stuck in their manuscripts. In weekly workshop sessions, we'll re-examine what's actually at stake in the narrative draft. We'll help each other dive deeper in our writing, to rediscover submerged aspects of the narrative that can be further explored - and what to do once we've uncovered them. With accompanying readings of novel excerpts and stories, we'll also examine how to incorporate next-level techniques such as re-sequencing the plot, imposing metaphorical value, and thematic layering of storylines.

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will work on novel-length projects, completing two polished chapters and an outline of a full novel. We will explore how to structure a book that is both propulsive and character-driven, and how to create a compelling, unique narrative voice. Work by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Ha Jin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Akhil Sharma will help us consider the crucial relationship between characters and their contexts.

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, economical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we'll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale. By pairing readings with generative exercises in stylistics and constrained writing, we will build toward the translation of a short work of contemporary fiction into English. To participate in this workshop, students should be able to comfortably read a literary text in a foreign language.

Every writer of personal nonfiction knows that ultimately the story isn't about them: it's about something larger, perhaps universal, and their personal story is merely a means to that end. The key to this paradox is the synecdoche, or the part that stands for the whole. The universe in a grain of sand, the one story that tells many people's story. Anne Fadiman did it in_The Spirit Catches You and Then You Fall Down, her book about a Hmong immigrant in the United States. So did Joan Didion, in_Where I Was From; by telling the story of her family, she told the story of California, and by telling the story of California she told the story of the West and thus of America. Rian Malan did the same for South Africa in _My Traitor's Heart: by telling the story of his family he told the story of Apartheid, and thus of our segregated world. We'll look at how these and other writers locate the universal in their particulars, and discuss how to apply their example to your own writing._

This course aims to investigate, through a range of readings and writing exercises, various units of composition and the ways that they interact with each other in poems. We will study and imitate traditional formal approaches, such as the poetic foot, meter, caesuras, sprung rhythm, rhymed stanzas, and refrains. We also will study and imitate modernist and contemporary "units," such as the word (approached, for example, etymologically or connotatively), the free verse line, the variable foot, vers libre, serial form, the sentence (the "new" sentence, but also modulations of basic syntax), the paragraph, the page, and forms of call and response. This reading intensive course will draw from a selection of mostly modern and contemporary poetry, poetics, and criticism, most likely include major works by Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Stevens, Frost, Eliot, and Mallarm_, as well as Lyn Hejinian's My Life, Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, and James Tate's The Ghost Soldiers. Students will be expected to submit weekly technical exercises, complete several short critical responses, write a longer essay, and submit a final portfolio of revised material.

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing world-building, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing world-building is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from character dynamics, to setting, to social systems, and even the story or novel's conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of realism, historical fiction, or science fiction, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful world-building, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to not just how to do research, but how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works long and short fiction with an eye to its world-building, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.

This seminar looks primarily at fiction that blurs the line between imagination and experience. We'll look at highly memoiristic "autofiction" by the likes of Rachel Cusk, Renata Adler, and Hitomi Kanehara. Authors who have addressed the same subjects in both works of fiction and nonfiction, including Kathryn Harrison and James Baldwin, will also be of interest to us. As will nonfiction novels and/or highly novelistic journalism by George Orwell, Ryzard Kapuchinski, and Katherine Boo. Finally, we'll look at some radio and film works that deliberately and/or "ecstatically" smudge the truth, by Orson Welles, Banksy, and Werner Herzog. The focus of this course is very much on responding critically to each text and the larger question of genre. But there will also be opportunities for creative exercises. As such this course is particularly meant for Creative Writing majors in fiction but will appeal to any student interested in contemporary literature.