English 236 - Winter, 2013

Poetics

Class Information

Instructor: Wenderoth, Joe
CRN: 73749
Time: R 3:10-6:00
Location: 308 Voorhies
Breadth: Later American
Focus: Other National

Description

OBJECTIVES: The intention of this course is to develop an understanding and/or a feel for the lyric cell, which has existed in one way or another in every society we have record of. By looking at a variety of poems, particularly poems closer to us in tongue and time and place, we will attempt to articulate a range a ways in which the lyric cell might be inhabited. I am particularly interested in your making the course your own, which is to say, in your taking the course material and finding in it what is of special importance to you, your work. While the course may be of use to scholars, it is designed for creative writers; I’d like, then, to make a real effort to see that the ideas and the critical analyses that the class forces upon you… might bear fruit somehow in relation to your own work as an artist.

REAL OBJECTIVES: Poetry is a black hole. A more or less comfortable erasure process. The more and the less, strictly speaking, being everything. Is it a question of the strange pleasure of being able to articulate the diminishment of everything—which may be, of course, the most sublime ensuring of everything, even as a kind of rest is achieved?


Grading

COURSE WORKLOAD: tba.

GRADING: tba