2020-2021

This course studies how writers engage the senses to shape language into something actually felt and not just comprehended. We’ll track the sensual life of words—what they do to the mouth, to the ear, their musical kinships with one another—and learn how these qualities combine to generate mood and atmosphere. Alongside writing that renders embodiment and the physical world, we’ll read writing that makes abstraction feel concrete. Our reading will guide our ongoing inquiry into questions such as: what constitutes an image? How does writing enact feeling? How do the sensory elements of a piece intensify or erode or expand its subject, and to what end? Case studies may include poetry and prose by Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, Homer, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jean Toomer, D. H. Lawrence, Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Ai, Elaine Scarry, Wanda Coleman, Toni Morrison, Hai-Dang Phan, Nathaniel Mackey, Durga Chew-Bose, Justin Torres, and Jenny Zhang. These writers will provide inspiration for your own creative experiments on the page. Students will be asked to lead one presentation during the quarter and to write short weekly pieces to extend the group discussion.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:40–5:40 PM

This course explores basic approaches to writing poems through careful reading and discussion of modern and contemporary poets. We’ll practice poetic elements, such as rhythm, diction, syntax, and metaphor, at the same time that we explore the movements of mind and the moods that lyricism makes available. The class will practice literary community building by discussing peers’ poems in workshops, by responding to poems and essays by contemporary and modern poets and critics, and by attending literary events on campus. For the first few sessions, our discussions will focus primarily on readings. As we move forward, we will spend the majority of time workshopping student work.

Day/Time: Friday, 10:20-12:20

Might there be a kind of poem that is a parasite latched on to a host body? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts. We’ll examine ways that poems create these intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating…) and test out these methods in our own writing. Students should expect to engage with the basic question of how their work relates to other texts. Expect to read a substantial amount of work by modern and contemporary poets, submit new original poems for workshop, complete intertextual writing exercises, keep a reading journal, write critical responses to the readings and peers’ work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.

Day/Time: Mondays, 10:20-12:20

This workshop will support students in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Working with recent technological transformations in the visual arts world, we’ll be keeping art notebooks in different forms (by hand, photographs, blog, instagram, collage). We’ll begin with Walter Benjamin’s classic essay about art and mechanical reproduction, and then work with some examples: 1. Virtually seen. Jennie C. Jones’s show Constant Structure, hung at the Arts Club of Chicago via face time, with pamphlet-catalogue by poet and critic Fred Moten; 2. Unseen. Lori Waxman, long the art critic of the Chicago Tribune, and her pandemic 60 word / min art critic project in Newcity of art reviews for artists with canceled shows; 3. Explained / packaged. The instagram feeds of museums; 4. Technological diary / memory methods. Looking back to T.J. Clarke’s book of 2006 The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, and to Teju Cole’s Blind Spot, which uses his own photographs, and looking now at instagram feeds of Cole and other art writers; 5. Collaborations. Artists working as collaborator-curators and self-interpreters, with reference to a recent Dawoud Bey show at the Art Institute and a Venice installation by iris Kensmil and Remy Jungerman.  Each class will begin with student-led observation. Students will visit, in-person or on-line, five installations / exhibitions / events, and be workshopped twice. Final work, revised essay and looking notebook portfolio. 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40 PM

In this advanced poetry workshop we will turn from the Romantic notion of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling…recollected in tranquility” towards a postmodern practice of radical recycling in response to global crisis. We will resurrect, excavate, interrogate, pilfer from, and otherwise raid a variety of archives, as a means of artistic engagement with the circulating materials of civic life. We will study examples of literary works whose principal technique is one of scavenging among such nonliterary sources as court transcripts, weather reports, grammar lessons, a war criminal’s memoirs, and the dictionary itself, to create fresh encounters with language. Texts to be studied will include Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, Lisa Robertson’s The Weather, C.D. Wright’s One Big Self,and M. Nourbese Philips’ Zong!, among others. Students will spend the quarter seeking out and assembling their own archives, and experimenting on the page with acts of salvage. Because this is a workshop, a large part of every class will be devoted to discussions of students’ original work.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00 PM

Students will write and turn in two full-length stories or novel chapters for this workshop-based class. The class will pay special attention to plot: what it is, what the specific engines are that drive it, how it's connected to other elements such as character, setting, and dialogue. In addition to submitting and reading for workshop, expect to read and discuss at least one novel and a selection of short stories.

Day/Time: Thursday 1:00 - 4:00 PM

It’s clear, increasingly, that we live in a time of imperiling crisis—political, ecological, even religious. Apocalypse is one of the genres poets use to make moral claims on the present, as well as to envision the nature of reality to come. Apocalypse also refers to vision, to a way of seeing that is both allegorical and incendiary. How, within the realms and forms of the contemporary poetic imagination, can you persuasively engage apocalypse? In this workshop, students will approach your own apocalyptic claims with those of some visionary masters in hand, including Emily Dickinson, Robert Lax, Fanny Howe, Pam Rehm, Adonis, Lawrence Joseph, Brian Teare, Autumn Richardson, Tim Lilburn, and Richard Skelton. Forms, language, and vision will absorb our study with a focus on visualizing and sharing your own apocalyptic poetry.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40

Poetry writing is often undertaken with solemnity, but perhaps we’ve been approaching it all wrong. What if we read Prufrock as stand-up comedy? Dickinson as a dark humorist?  Stein as a prankster? Along with rethinking the daring but subtle humor of a few classic poets, this course will trace specific kinds of comedic moves in contemporary poetry. We’ll try to understand the maneuvers that make for varieties of humor, such as absurdity, irony, satire, parody, ridicule, and dark humor. Readings may include work by John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Russel Edson, Bernadette Mayer, Dorthea Lasky, James Tate, Dean Young, Mary Ruefle, Wendy Xu, Anne Carson, and Kenneth Koch. Students should expect to complete a series of writing exercises, give a presentation, and write a final essay. All while smiling.

Day/Time: Monday, 12:40-2:40

It’s long been said that there are no new stories, only new ways of telling old ones, but how do writers reengage familiar genres, plots, and themes without being redundant? This course will confront the literary cliché at all levels, from the trappings of genre to predictable turns of plot to the subtly undermining forces of mundane language. We will consider not only how stories can fall victim to cliché but also how they may benefit from calling on recognizable content for the sake of efficiency, familiarity, or homage. Through an array of readings that represent unique concepts and styles as well as more conventional narratives we will examine how published writers embrace or subvert cliché through story craft. Meanwhile, student fiction will be discussed throughout the term in a supportive workshop atmosphere that will aim not to expose clichés in peer work, but to consider how an author can find balance—between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between the predictable and the unpredictable—in order to maximize a story’s effect. Students will submit two stories to workshop and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:20-12:20

The art of nonfiction is sometimes described as the art of leaving things out, and nowhere is this more pronounced and problematic than in capturing character. The way you characterize people, places, and things ultimately says as much about you, the author, as it does about what you’re characterizing, and the goal of this class is to teach you to do so economically yet accurately, or at least fairly. Not reductively. We’ll start with the surface: with the eccentricities, tics, and quirks that make someone who they are, or appear to be. How to capture these oddities without sliding into caricature? Writers often default to physical description, but we’ll devote as much or more effort to the verbal, i.e., to exercises in dialogue, whose true power is not to convey information but character. We’ll also practice writing in body language, which is equally revealing of mien, demeanor, and underlying motivation. Beneath it all lies what we call ‘true character’: the values, morals, and ideals evident in deeds, facts, and what we might call properties, the essential characteristics of a culture, city, or place. Our weekly reading and writing assignments and exercises will culminate in a creative portfolio and a final essay, as well as the skills you’ll need to take workshops.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40