Seminar in Advanced Poetry

Course: ENGL 528
When: 2:30-6pm
Where: TBA
Instructor: Carole Simmons Oles
Phone: 530-898-5240
Email: coles@csuchico.edu

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Required Readings:

Robin Becker, The Horse Fair (Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2000)

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (New York: Knopf, 1998)

Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (New York: Vintage, 2000)

Philip Levine, The Simple Truth (New York: Knopf 1995)

Rick Noguchi, The Ocean Inside Kenji Takezo (Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1996)

Eds. Gerald Costanzo and Jim Daniels, American Poetry: The Next Generation (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000)

Note: Use the anthology for grazing. For purposes of your readings journal, find five poets whose work strikes you as arresting, perhaps showing you something you’d like to try in your own poems, and focus briefly on each of them.

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Selected Reading:

Choose at least two books you haven’t read from among the following:

Rafael Campo, What the Body Told

Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours

Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems

Kate Daniel, Four Testimonies

Toi Derricotte, Captivity

Mark Doty, My Alexandria

Kathy Fagan, Moving & ST RAGE

Jonathan Holden, Guns and Boyhood in America

Maxine Kumin, Always Beginning: Essays on A Life in Poetry

Carol Muske, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and The Shape of the Self

Cesar Pavese, Hard Labor (Trans. William Arrowsmith)

Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There

Alberto Rios, Capirotada:a Nogales Memoir

Wislawa Szymborska, Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts (Trans. Krynski & Maguire)

Derek Walcott, Omeros

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Course Description:

You should prepare for the residency by having completed all required readings in addition to the two books you’ve elected from the second list. Keep a readings journal of at least two typed, double-spaced pages for each book. This journal is primarily for your own use; it may be written informally, but not thoughtlessly. It should reflect substantive engagement with the readings in matters of style and content—for example, such elements as imagery, diction, symbol, figurative and literal language, structures, poetic genres, polyphonic effects. This list of suggestions is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive; use it as suits your own purposes. Bring your completed readings journal to the first class. It will constitute one part of your final portfolio.

This course will be conducted as a workshop, giving primary focus to students’ original new writing. Each student should bring to the residency ten new poems not workshopped previously, not currently submitted for publication or prizes. Each student will begin a total of five new poems during the residency. The frequency of each student’s reading of his/her work will depend on several variables, not the least of which is the size of the class. My goal is to have each student present a poem at least twice a week. Everyone should be prepared to submit to members of the workshop and me copies of five draft poems on the first day of class, and five on Monday of the second week. Poems written during the residency will be submitted on Friday of weeks 1 and 2, Monday of week 3. Each student is responsible for reading carefully the work of other students and annotating their poems for return to them. Further particulars of workshop procedures will be described when we meet. A final portfolio of revised new poems (and your readings journal) will be due to me in Chico with a postmark of no later than one week following the last day of class, that is August 10, 2001. No late work will be accepted.

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The Air in the Room:

My view is that the workshop process depends on an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust: while these in themselves are insufficient to make a productive workshop, without them other good cannot flow. I believe the workshop is not a place for competition (more than enough opportunities for that outside of it) or personal rather than poetic critique. Writers should be able to risk and to expect from their peers and me an attentive, candid, respectful reading of their work. I look forward to meeting you and your poems.

"After all, the only rule of travel is, Don’t come back the way you went. Come a new way."

--Anne Carson, from "The Anthropology of Water"