Buggin' you - where buggin' is lovin'

780/2-Imaginative Writing: Poetry James Tate
Tuesdays, 1-3:30
Workshop in the writing of poetry. Each week, a close reading analysis of poems submitted by the class and occasional poems brought in from outside. Attention to the way in which a poem works and how it comes together through its choice of images, rhythms and subject matter. Assignments in an anthology of contemporary poetry and supplementary reading. Enrollment limited to 10. Permission of instructor required of students not enrolled through the MFA Program in English.

James Tate is the author of Return to the City of White Donkeys, Memoir of he Hawk: Shroud of the Gnome; Worshipful Company of Fletchers, which won the National Book Award; Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Willliam Carlos Williams Award; Distance from Loved Ones; Reckoner; Constant Defender; Riven Doggeries; Viper Jazz; Absences; Hints to Pilgrims; The Oblivion Ha-Ha; and The Lost Pilot, selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He has published two books of prose, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee and The Route as Briefed. His awards include a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and has been recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

777-Modern Poetry Ruth Jennison
Thursdays, 1-3:30
This course will survey American poetry from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Students will become familiar with the canonical generational account of modernism (Dickinson; Whitman; Pound; Eliot; Stevens; Stein; Moore; Williams). However, discussions will also take up modernism's "others" (including Crane; Hughes; H.D; McKay; Zukofsky). Against modernism's own "cult of genius," we will read our poets as exemplary participants in interconnected and sometimes antagonistic literary movements, coteries, political fronts and avant-gardes. These groupings will include, but are not limited to: Imagism, Constructivism, Colloquial Nativism, Epic Classicism, Symbolism, the Harlem Renaissance, the poetics of the Popular Front and Objectivism. As we take up these canonical and alternative literary genealogies, we will also attend to the historical and political coordinates which subtend and substructure the various ideological orientations and formal strategies of early twentieth century American poetics. To what aspects of capitalist modernity are modern poets responding? How do uneven developments in racial formation, politics, economics and culture provide the conditions of possibility for modernist poetry's contradictory commitments to precapitalist organicism and futural experimentation? What is the relationship between the production of new social subjects (the "new Woman;" the "new Jew;" the "New Negro") and the innovative languages of a modern poetry seeking transformation in art and life? Finally, we will survey to the critical construction of modernism itself -- from its initial solidification as "movement" by the "New Criticism" to its current restructuring by Cultural Materialists working in the "New Modernist Studies." In this overview of modern poetry's critical history, we will seek the answer to the following question: Why is literary modernism often the privileged site of new critical-aesthetic narratives of modernity's historical traumas and/or potentials?

Ruth Jennison is presently writing a book entitled "The Zukofsky Era" which elaborates an alternative genealogy of modernist poetics. In it, she constructs the historical, literary and theoretical coordinates of the materialist Avant-Garde constellating around Louis Zukofsky's "Objectivist" poetics of the 1920s and 30s. Her interests include American modernist and postmodernist poetics, the theory of the Avant-Garde, Marxist literary theory, and psychoanalytic approaches to subject formation and aesthetic form.

And, I will continue to get credit for my internship work.