Week 6: Experimentation

The organizing theme for the final week of our class is experimentation, and we’ll be looking at a handful of texts that bring experimental writing to the fore.

Agenda for Tuesday, 10 August

• Our class will open with a discussion of the poems from Brandon Shimoda’s Evening Oracle on Box—poems that he wrote “at night before sleep” while traveling in Japan.
  • We’ll focus in particular on “The Japanese Apricot.”
  • Recommended reading: Shimoda’s series of essays for futurefeed.
• Workshop #9: Zoe and Xander

Assignments: (1) finish your portfolio, which is due on Wednesday, 11 August by the beginning of class; (2) read Stéphane Mallarmé’s “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” (here; French original) and the selections from Women in Concrete Poetry on Box; (3) prepare your reading and introduction for our class’s reading on Thursday.

Agenda for Wednesday, 11 August

• For the first half of class we’ll discuss Mallarmé’s iconic modernist poem, “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”
• The second half of our class—and our final discussion—will center on concrete poetry, looking at works featured in Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979.

Assignments: prepare your reading and introduction for the final performance!

Agenda for Thursday, 12 August

• We’ll spend a little bit of time reflecting back on the past six weeks, and do one final retrospective activity together.
• At 3:30, we’ll turn to our class’s reading, which will begin around 3:40.

Week 5: Re/Dislocation

For our penultimate week, we’ll return to our earlier conversations about the way language moves us across things, or the way in which a poem can translate (literally: bring across) or offer a metaphor (literally: bring across), but this time in geographical terms.

Agenda for Tuesday, 3 August

• We’ll begin class by discussing (1) expectations for your final portfolios and (2) your final performances. You will also choose the order of your final performances for our last class. (The order will determine whose work you introduce, so you’ll want to get in touch with one another—with permission, I’ll share everyone’s email.)
• Discussion of selections from Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, focusing on the way in which we can think of the selections from “Seafarer” in conversation with “Report.” I’ll give a little bit of background for Bergvall’s project.
• Workshop #7: Yunan, Fengyi, Jiaying

Assignments: Read Zong!—yes, the whole thing. Since your reading responses are optional, I want you to come to class prepared with two comments about specific parts of the text (note page numbers) and two questions to share with your peers (again, point to specific parts of the text)

Agenda for Wednesday, 4 August

• Our class today will center on discussions of Zong! and the way in which it takes up historical texts and reimagines them in order to redress gaps in historical documents concerning the Middle Passage, to invent missing archives, and to think broadly about the capacities of language. We’ll revisit Jen Bervin’s Nets, Claudia Rankine’s “notes on the state of whiteness,” the translations of Wang Wei we considered, and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift as texts that we might put in conversation with this one.
• We’ll also spend some time discussing the idea of location, migration, movement, diaspora, and travel in terms of the broader themes of our course, and its underlying questions: across which boundaries does poetry (as opposed to other literary forms) move, and how does poetry move us?

Assignments: Read Blaise Cendrars’s “Prose of the Trans-Siberian” (optional: take a look at Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage,” Mina Loy’s “Lunar Baedeker,” and Apollinaire’s “Zone” and “Little Car” to situate Cendrars’s writing within a context of Modernist poetry about travel); prepare feedback for workshop; turn in your last weekly poem(s) (aside from office hours, this will be your last opportunity to receive feedback from me, so feel free to turn in more than one poem, or any revisions alongside your work, but label what you turn in as work for week 5).

Agenda for Thursday, 5 August

• Discussion of “Prose of the Trans-Siberian,” focusing on the idea of certain kinds of travel as ways to evoke a sense of “modernity,” “cosmopolitanism,” or “global-ness.” (How can we think of Cendrars’s poetry in conversation with Philip’s, or Bergvall’s?)
• Workshop #8: Bryan and Lauren

Assignments: Read excerpts from Brandon Shimoda’s Evening Oracle; prepare feedback for workshop; work on your final portfolios (including expansions/revisions of your poetic statements and any additional poems you’d like to add).

Week 4: Narrativization

This week, I will be returning feedback on your revisions and poetic statements. (Note: if your poem for workshop this week was included in your revision, I will only give you feedback on that work once.)

Agenda for Tuesday, 27 July

We’ll begin class with a discussion of Hannah Sullivan’s poem “You, Very Young in New York.” After a break, we’ll then turn to a workshop of poems by Fengyi, Jiaying, and Bryan.

Assignments: Read Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart (optional: reading response). It will be helpful for our discussion to number the 45 sections of My Life.

Agenda for Wednesday, 28 July

Discussion of how narrative intersects with poetics, or how we can think of poetry in relation to the self. We’ll discuss Hejinian before the break and Kapil after the break.

Assignments: Turn in your poem for the week; prepare feedback for workshop #6. Use this opportunity to catch up on any writing assignments.

Agenda for Thursday, 29 July

For the first part of class, we’ll do a generative writing exercise (inspired, in part, by a suggestion from the midsemester evaluations) centered around poetic narratives about the self. We’ll then workshop pieces by Xander and Zoe.

Assignments: Read the selections from Drift and begin reading Zong! (I expect you to read the entire thing—it’s a long text). Upload poems for workshops 7 and 8. Prepare feedback for workshop 7.

Week 3: Mixed-Media(tion)

Workshops for the week: Tuesday (Zoe and Fengyi); Thursday (Yunan, Lauren)

NOTE: The writing/reading for this week is a little bit more intensive than weeks 1 and 2. If you need an extension (one or two days) on your own writing/revisions, please communicate with me! Your revisions are an opportunity to get feedback from me on more than one poem at once—I’ll respond to however much you share with me.

Agenda for Tuesday, 20 July

We’ll start off our week on thinking about the way that poetry mediates and the way that poetry can use multiple media at once by taking a look—and listen—at Douglas Kearney’s poem “f.u.gitivity.” Before we begin our discussion, I’ll ask you to do two things:

1. Share one thing in the chat that you found interesting from the visual poems by Kearney.
2. Read this excerpt from Kearney’s interview with The Yale Literary Magazine (Spring 2020), which makes reference to one of the visual poems I asked you to look at over the weekend (a poem Kearney calls a “Photoshop poem,” in contrast to his earlier “InDesign poems,” like this):

LIT: Your work has for a long time engaged in experiments of typography, placement, and form. But […] poems you’ve published most recently in Poetry Magazine have been even more collage-y, with even more visual elements and even smaller units of meaning. I thought it could be cool to look at one of your newer poems and talk about it, a sort of close looking. If someone were to ask you to read this poem, “a ship crashes down…” what would you say? Is there a way you would read it?

DK: You went directly to the heart of it. […] I wrote the InDesign poems thinking that I would succeed at creating poems I could not read aloud without technological interventions. And because those technological interventions would in some way undermine the poems, I would be able to argue for not reading them aloud. […] How do you know which text is on top or on bottom, which is front, which is back? The moment I read it—

LIT: You’ve made a choice, and narrowed the field of interpretation.

DK: Exactly. If I decided to read that live and wanted to as accurately as possible re-perform or reproduce the page experience, I would have to pre-record my voice doing one of the layers of text. Suddenly that creates a hierarchy that doesn’t exist in the text.

The first time I started writing The Black Automaton poems, I thought I’d introduce a poem like “The Black Automaton in de despair of existence #3” and then I’d read it, and then I’d say immediately after, “The Black Automaton in de despair of existence #3”, and then I’d read it again a different way, And then I’d say, “The Black Automaton in de despair of existence #3,” and so on. But that felt like too much of a jerk move.

So instead, I would give a poem to somebody in the audience and give them a pen and say, number it how you think I should read it. That demonstrated that I did not have a predetermined reading strategy for it. And I would say, this is Jordan’s sequencing of “The Black Automaton in de despair of existence #3” and I would read your sequencing as best as I could.

And I did that for about five years, until I felt like I’d gathered enough information about how people read the performative typography poems.

LIT: That’s a fun fringe benefit: you’re collecting data about the way people interact with your work. They have to, on the spot, come up with their most intuitive way from top to bottom.

DK: Exactly! But when I got to the Photoshop poems, I had frankly begun grappling with this question about the poetry reading as a site and event. It’s pretty simple: much of my work critiques the spectacularization of violence done to Black people. As a performer—ever since my choir days, I’ve been trained formally in performance—I have tried to do a very good job at performing. How do I critique the spectacularization of anti-Black violence and entertainment by performing in ways that are entertaining or spectacular? (“Spectacular”? Ok, maybe that’s a humblebrag.)

Now I recognize that the history of Black performance culture, specifically in the U.S., has long braided those two things. So this is not supposed to sound like a revelation. But it got weird-feeling. It was a moment of, I don’t know how it feels to do this.

A couple of things happened that were very useful. I did a reading at Kelly Writers House in Philly, and I heard from the people assembled that they worked with the InDesign poems in class by reading them collectively. That goes back to what you said earlier, about the collaborative or ensemble engagement of my pieces. And it wasn’t just that they were interpreting it collectively. There was a collective act of reading it. At the time, I was like, whoa, I’ve won the lottery. This is fantastic, I’ve made a thing that creates community around the act of reading a poem. That was huge to have in my life. It was a beautiful moment.

And then I began thinking about these Photoshop poems. So what I figured was, if we look at this poem, and imagine me reading it aloud: What is the timbre relationship between the typeface on the word “mission”—which comes from the movie poster to the Robert De Niro film Mission—and the black-letter of “und er wird immer…”? What should I do with my voice to communicate the distinction between those two texts? How will that not become distracting, aurally, in a way that visually it might not be distracting?

In my head, if I tried to read this poem aloud, if I tried to read this “heaven”—which is in this bold sans serif font, but it’s also kind of receding—I’m immediately going to have to do something that I think is comical, because performing it feels silly. It would be like “heavenarple.” That would feel like I hurt the poem. […] So the long answer to your question: I won’t read it aloud. Not because I don’t know how it works. But I think it’s because me reading this aloud actually harms the work, something I’ve hoped my performance has never done.

http://yalelitmag.com/spring-2020/contents/interview-with-douglas-kearney.html

After discussing “f.u.gitivity,” we’ll take a short break before turning to Workshop #3. We’ll spend about half an hour discussing Zoe’s poem, and after another short break, we’ll turn to Fengyi’s poem.

Assignments: (1) read Simone White’s “bound together by this matter” (carefully!) as well as “Dear Angel of Death” (read as much as you can, but definitely make sure to skim the whole thing); (2) listen to Elysia Crampton’s album ORCORARA 2010 (review and review); (3) write up a reading response; (4) start working on your poem(s) for Week 3; (5) begin preparing your revisions.

Agenda for Wednesday, 21 July

• For the first half of class, we’ll be focusing on how poetry—or writing about poetry—can interact with other media by engaging with the recent, long-form, essayistic work of Simone White that engages with music. What ideas does her piece “bound together by this matter” engage? Between what ideas or concepts or people or readers does it mediate? How does trap music relate to White’s “language about trap music? We’ll also use this time to look closely at a couple of passages from “Dear Angel of Death,” the long-form piece (essay? poem?) from the collection of the same name. How does a track listing constitute a poem, as opposed to, or alongside a playlist?
• Mid-semester evaluation!
• [longer break]
• Overview/expectations for revisions and statement on poetics draft.
• During the second half of class, we’ll talk briefly about the way in which musical artists often turn to poetry, with reference to Elysia Crampton’s ORCORARA 2010 (an album that crosses musical genres) as our common text. We’ll discuss lyrics to music in relation to non-vocal music and in relation to use of spoken word. How does poetic language disappear into other sounds? How does music emphasize the sounds at play in poetic language? How do we read rhythms, and how do we hear/feel them? We’ll also synchronously (while muted) listen to one track from the album, and make notes about what we hear. How can we bring these sensations into our own work?

Assignments: (1) read Maxe Crandall’s “Irresistible Forces” (and turn in your optional reading response); (2) prepare feedback for Workshop #4; (3) turn in your weekly poem(s) and revisions. Note: I will be offering feedback on everyone’s revisions. This is an opportunity to begin organizing yourself for the final portfolio!

Agenda for Thursday, 22 July

• Before our workshop, we’ll spend some time discussing Maxe Crandall’s poem “Irresistible Forces,” and its various media and mediations.
• [break]
• We’ll then turn to Workshop #4—looking at poems by Yunan and Lauren.

Assignments: (1) statement on poetics (this is a polished draft, but there should be enough here for me to give you feedback); (2) read Hannah Sullivan’s “You, Very Young in New York“; (3) prepare feedback for Workshop #5 (Fengyi, Jiaying, and Bryan); (4) begin reading Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart

Week 2: Translation

Our creative writing workshop schedule is as follows:

• Workshop 1: Tuesday, 13 July (Lauren and Yunan)
• Workshop 2: Thursday, 15 July (Jiaying, Bryan, and Xander)
• Workshop 3: Tuesday, 20 July (Zoe and Fengyi)
• Workshop 4: Thursday, 22 July (Yunan and Lauren)
• Workshop 5: Tuesday, 27 July (Fengyi, Jiaying, and Bryan)
• Workshop 6: Thursday, 29 July (Xander and Zoe)
• Workshop 7: Tuesday, 3 August (Yunan, Fengyi, and Jiaying)
• Workshop 8: Thursday, 5 August (Bryan and Lauren)
• Workshop 9: Tuesday, 10 August (Zoe and Xander)

A reminder: for Tuesday workshops, please upload your work to Box by Saturday; for Thursday workshops, please upload your work to Box by Monday.

Agenda for Tuesday, 13 July

• One more round of introductions: your name, any languages you speak/read/write/understand, and a figurative “language” you know (the language of…maps, bread-making, the harpsichord, video games, stand up, coding, etc.)
• Discussion: Rosa Alcala’s “Voice Activation” (please also read “Heritage Speaker”)
• [5 minute break]
• Workshop #1: Lauren and Yunan
  • We’ll spend about half an hour or so discussing each student’s piece(s), with a five minute break between discussions. While your poem/s is/are being workshopped, your only task is to listen and take notes. Our conversations will always begin with an account of what the poem is about and a description of its form—just to make sure that we’re all on the same page. This is an opportunity to share an objective interpretation or gloss of the piece, or a way of describing what it’s doing.
  • Only once we’ve established what the poem is will we turn to what the poem is doing well, or what it could be doing more of. What is working, or what is the poem working toward? What are the poem’s most successful moments, and why?
  • With a baseline of what the poem is about and what it does successfully, only then will we turn to a critical discussion of ways the poem might develop or improve. We’ll approach constructive criticism with suggestions of how the author might revise the piece, whether that be elaborating on a moment, replacing a word/phrase, excising something, etc.
  • Finally, the author will have a chance to ask questions to the class. Note: I will be delivering feedback after class via email, but if you’d like more feedback, please come to my office hours! I’m happy to continue the conversation or help with the editing process.

Assignments: (1) read 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei and Mouth: Eats Color (Hathitrust ETA); (2) turn in your reading response (~400 words); (3) start working on your poem for the week if you haven’t already.

Agenda for Wednesday, 14 July

• Mini-lecture: problems of translation, translation techniques, and the edges of language
• Discussion and practice: 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei
• [break]
• Introduction to Mouth: Eats Color, including background on Chika Sagawa, Japanese syllabaries, and writing a “series” of poems
• Breakout rooms: discussion of promenade poems

Assignments: (1) prepare feedback for Workshop #2; (2) turn in your weekly poem (including an account of it); (3) bring in a poem for an in-class activity. For the activity, you will need to create a Google doc with the poem. The sharing settings should be changed to “anyone with this link can edit.” (Go to the blue Share button in the upper right hand corner → under Get Link, click “Change” → Anyone with the link → Editor.)

Agenda for Thursday, 15 July

• Rather than beginning with a discussion of a poem, we’ll do a collaborative defamiliarization and brutal translation activity.
• [5 minute break]
• Workshop #2: Jiaying, Bryan, and Xander
  • We’ll spend about half an hour or so discussing each poem, with a five minute break between each one. While your poem is being workshopped, your only task is to listen and take notes. Our conversations will always begin with an account of what the poem is about and a description of its form—just to make sure that we’re all on the same page. This is an opportunity to share an objective interpretation or gloss of the piece, or a way of describing what it’s doing.
  • Only once we’ve established what the poem is will we turn to what the poem is doing well, or what it could be doing more of. What is working, or what is the poem working toward? What are the poem’s most successful moments, and why?
  • With a baseline of what the poem is about and what it does successfully, only then will we turn to a critical discussion of ways the poem might develop or improve. We’ll approach constructive criticism with suggestions of how the author might revise the piece, whether that be elaborating on a moment, replacing a word/phrase, excising something, etc.
  • Finally, the author will have a chance to ask questions to the class. Note: I will be delivering feedback after class via email, but if you’d like more feedback, please come to my office hours! I’m happy to continue the conversation or help with the editing process.

Assignments: (1) if your work is being discussed at Workshop #3 or #4, upload your work; (2) read and listen to “f.u.gitivity” (which we will discuss in class on Tuesday); also read “The Black Automaton in Tag: Refugee” (here), “… a ship crashes down … ” (here), “Of Agricultural Work” (here), “Falling Dark at the Quarters” (here), and “Wolves” (here), and turn in your mini-response; (3) prepare feedback for Workshop #3; (4) begin reading Simone White’s “bound together by this matter” and “Dear Angel of Death” (to be uploaded; pp. 69–152 on Hathitrust ETA) and begin listening to Elysia Crampton’s ORCORARA 2010 (helpful resources: review and review; lyrics); and (5) begin working on your next poem and revisions.

Week 1: Form(ation)

Welcome to Comparative Literature 50: Creative Writing, Comparative Writing! Every week, you’ll find on this page an agenda of course activities for each of our classes, as well as assignments.

In preparation for our first day, please make sure that you have done the following:

• Make sure that you can access our Box folder (if you’re having trouble, send me an email)
• Bookmark (1) this website, (2) our Box folder, and (3) the Zoom link for our course meetings
• Acquire a copy of Jen Bervin’s Nets to read and respond to by Thursday (if you have been unable to do so, please contact me ASAP)
• Fill out this questionnaire by noon on Wednesday
• Take a look at this week’s poetry prompt and instructions for reading responses (both due by noon on Thursday)

Agenda for Tuesday, 6 July

• Introductions and icebreaker
  • name and pronouns
  • how you situate yourself in relation to your studies
  • something about your relationship to writing/reading poetry
  • something “low-key controversial” that you feel about poetry
• Syllabus overview, course expectations
• Overview of website and Box folder
• Questions/comments/concerns
• Collective close reading of the following poem:

Western wind when will thou blow
the small rain down can rain
Christ! if my love were in my arms
and I in my bed again.

• Closing: looking to the rest of the week, expectations around Jen Bervin’s Nets and Claudia Rankine’s “notes on the state of whiteness”

Assignments: fill out the introductory questionnaire; select a poem (by someone else) to share with the class and upload it here; begin reading Jen Bervin’s Nets and Claudia Rankine’s “notes on the state of whiteness”; begin working on your weekly poem(s) (prompt)

Agenda for Wednesday, 7 July

• Short icebreaker activity
  • repeat the name of the person who spoke before you and their favorite plant
  • names & pronouns
  • where you’re from
  • your favorite plant
• Workshop sign-ups (here)
• Identifying concerns, establishing curiosities
• [5 minute break]
• Community guidelines
  • Individually, I’ll ask you to spend seven minutes writing down answers to the following:
    • For you, what factors contribute to creating a collective learning environment?
    • What is the most important guideline you’d suggest to help build our reading and writing community?
    • Explain why this is important and how it will impact your and our shared experiences in this class. You might want to consider guidelines pertaining to respect, active listening, inclusive language, constructive criticism/peer review, etc.
  • We’ll come together and share what you wrote down, and then break into pairs for 10 minutes to draft some guidelines:
    • As a pair, write a few statements starting with the phrase “We will…“
    • Once you’re satisfied, post your proposed guideline(s) to our Google Doc.
  • After 10 minutes, I’ll send a note to the chat asking you to examine the other groups’ posts, and consider whether there’s anything you’d like to edit or revise, anything you’d like to add. Please post a reply if there’s anything you’d like to edit, revise, cut, add, etc.
  • Finally, we’ll come back together to vote to reach consensus. Each and every individual should feel comfortable with the community guidelines we establish for this class. Our community guidelines are meant to be treated as a living document, and we’ll always have the option to continue revisiting, revising, and expanding these guidelines over the course of the semester.
• [5 minute break]
• Poems brought in by students
  • We’ll begin this activity with a small discussion of what “form” means, as opposed to content, and then turn to the poems you’ve brought in.
  • After reading the poems aloud for the whole class, we’ll break out into different groups to discuss the poems:
    • What formal qualities do you note in these poems? How do the poets use stanzas, line breaks, verse forms?
    • How do the formal qualities of the poems shift what each poem is about? How would another form shift your interpretation of the poem?
    • What similarities/differences can you draw across the poems in your group?
  • Finally, we’ll come back together, and I’ll ask each of you to share one interesting thing from your group’s conversation.
• Closing activity: share a question or curiosity with the class about something related to the course

Assignments: Sign up for workshops; finish reading Jen Bervin’s Nets and Claudia Rankine’s “notes on the state of whiteness”; upload (1) your reading response and (2) your weekly poem(s) to Box (in your folder) by noon on Thursday. For our class discussion, select one poem from Nets that you found particularly interesting (for its rewriting of Shakespeare’s sonnet, for its use of erasure, for what it draws out of language; for its formal interventions; etc.).

Agenda for Thursday, 8 July

• Writing prompt: during the first ten minutes of class, I’ll ask you to look at the poem from Nets that you selected. Take notes for yourself on the following:
  • What is the full sonnet about?
  • What is the erasure poem about?
  • How does the sonnet relate to the erasure poem?
• Before we turn to our discussion of Nets, we’ll ratify the community guidelines drafted yesterday and collated here.
• We’ll open our discussion with a short conversation about sonnets generally (meter, rhyme scheme, the volta) and Shakespeare’s sonnets specifically; the role of the sonnet in English poetic history and Shakespeare’s role within that history; how you might think about existing sonnets or your own. We’ll also talk briefly about erasure poetry, found poetry, the cento, and golden shovel forms.
• [five minute break]
• We’ll then break into small groups to return to your writing prompts from the beginning of class and focus in on individual poems in Bervin’s Nets.
• As a class, we’ll then talk about how some of those individual poems are working, and trends throughout the book.
• [five minute break]
• For the last part of class, we’ll turn to Claudia Rankine’s erasure poem “notes on the state of whiteness,” which is taken from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).
• Closing activity: relate one thing to the class about how you might consider using existing poetry or writing as a basis to produce your own poetry. What other kinds of sources might one use to create a found poem?

Assignments: If your work is being discussed on Tuesday, upload whatever you’d like us to discuss by Saturday afternoon to Box here; if your work is being discussed on Thursday, upload whatever you’d like us to discuss by Monday afternoon to Box here. Upload your peer feedback to the poems for Workshop #1 by noon on Tuesday; upload your mini reading responses to Rosa Alcalá to your own Box folder by Tuesday at noon (optional if your work is not being discussed). You might also want to begin reading 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei and Mouth: Eats Color, drafting your reading response, and beginning work on your second weekly poem(s).