Buggin' you - where buggin' is lovin'

Everybody wants to know! So, here's the scoop:

780/2-Imaginative Writing: Poetry Dara Wier
We will discuss the various considerations a poet imagines while composing or revising a poem, the role reading plays in these activities and the various ways people incorporate poetry in their lives. Our main events will be your work-in-progress. We'll occasionally read and talk about essays and poems from supplementary texts TBA available from Wootton's Books. Enrollment limited to 10. Permission of instructor required of anyone not enrolled through MFA Program in English.

Dara Wier's books include Our Master Plan (Carnegie-Mellon), Blue for the Plough (Carnegie-Mellon), The Book of Knowledge (Carnegie-Mellon), All You Have in Common (Carnegie-Mellon), The 8-Step Grapevine (Carnegie-Mellon), Blood, Hook & Eye (University of Texas). She was the 1993 Richard Hugo Memorial Chairholder at the University of Montana. Before coming to Amherst she's taught at University of Texas, University of Utah, University of Alabama and Hollins College. Her work has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation.

ENGL 891JJ History and Memory in Contemporary American Fiction, Joseph Skerrett

In the face of the uncertainties and mendacities of post-modern life, the struggle for integrity often draws writers to cultural traditions that can be constructed or reconstructed on human rather than institutional terms. In the resulting works of art, mergers of identity and history are often achieved through the use of myth, storytelling rituals, and varieties of memory (personal, mythic, cultural, "racial") that refute, resist or complement the official or institutional "master narratives." After considering some ideas about memory, we will examine works that reflect itls use in literature, from Proustian subjective memory to collective memory and cultural politics. Reading: Carolyn Forche, The Angel of History (poems) Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Alan Gurganus, Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All, Joy Kogawa, Obasan, Li-Young Lee, Rose (poems) and The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, Lee Smith, Oral History, Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl, James Welch, Fools Crow, Tina de Rosa, Paper Fish, SinghSkerrett & Hogan, eds., Memory and Cultural Politics, essays and exceprts from other critical writings.

And the verdict? I'm having a great time in both of the classes, writing poems every week, and reading and discussing some very good books. I have to give a presentation on Thursday on Li-Young Lee's Rose, so I better hop to!

Next week: I'll learn more about a potential internship with the Juniper Initiative.