SYLLABUS updated January 18, 2005
texts | pre-requisites | Course Description | Introduction | Workshop format | Workshop Guidelines | Summary of requirements
English 340—Advanced Creative
Writing: Poetry
Independent Study [3 credit course]
Dr. Jeffrey Ethan Lee
Office: Ross 1170A
Hrs: MWF 8:45-9:00 a.m. & 10:00-10:45 & 1:00-1:25 p.m., Th. 5:00-6:00 p.m. and by arrangement.
In class MWF 9:00-9:50a.m., 1:25-2:15 p.m., & Th. 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Phone: (970) 351-1476 / e-mail: jeffrey.lee@unco.edu
website: www.unco.edu/poetry/jeffrey.lee
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,
3rd edn. Vol. 2, Contemporary Poetry.
Sharon Olds' The Gold Cell (Knopf) ISBN: 0394747704
Selected web sites:
The Crucible: the UNC literary/arts magazine #14 at http://asstudents.unco.edu/students/litmag/or http://beam.to/litmag/
English 240 or another intro to creative writing with a workshop format.
[if you do not have this pre-requisite you must Withdraw.]
English 340: Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry [Independent Study] can be taken either as a tutorial (thoughtful one-on-one responses to your work).
It can also be taken as an intensive small group workshop that starts in the summer. In the latter, there is great participation in online peer forums. For both the tutorial and the summer workshop, there are readings from great literature and required response logs, and there is a final portfolio of your best work due at the end of the term.
You can choose to do this course as a one-on-one tutorial that starts in Spring 2005 or as a more interactive course for a small group any time.
When you choose the tutorial, I am the only person who will be obligated to read and respond to your work. You may still share your work with other students by posting works in progress and revisions in a Tutorials' Works-in-Progress forum, but no one will have to respond, and you will not have to respond to anyone else's work.
In the tutorial, you can go at your own pace.
You can post as many as 12 poems to me and submit 10 HW response logs. Even though you can do this course at your own speed, it will probably work best if you stick to some sort of schedule, e.g. finishing a unit once a week or once a month. Please say at the outset, meaning, within a week, if you plan to finish in roughly 12 weeks or 12 months.
Important: you can choose to post as few as 6 poems if you are submitting longer poems. Anything over 40-50 lines could be considered a long poem. If you write a long poem, you can just say that is your intention and skip the following week (or month on the 12-month schedule.)
Possible questions:
Can you ever just skip submitting a poem or a HW log? Yes, but then that means you lose an opportunity to get my response.
Can you skip a week (or a month if you are on a 12-month schedule) and then send twice as many next time? Yes, but then I may ignore one of them.
In the end, you must submit a final portfolio of work.
(NOTE: the small group course may also offers these tracks, i.e. one unit per week or one unit per month. The group course also offers the option of submitting six poems to me that do not have to go through the workshop.)
In the tutorial you still have the same reading assignments that the regular class has unless you have some special needs or circumstances.
Though much of this syllabus is geared for the small class, even people in the tutorial should read all of this syllabus anyway as much of the information will still apply to you, albeit in different ways.
The biggest difference is that in the tutorial, your final grade is 50% from your final portfolio and 50% from your HW response logs.
INTRO TO THE COURSE:
Dialogue between writers is the soil from which many great works have been born.
It fosters creative and abstract thought playfully. Constructive dialogues enable
you to develop more self-awareness as you see yourself participating in a larger
literary world. If you have ever thought of your creative writings as belonging
solely to yourself, here you have to agree that your writings belong to a larger
society. This is a great opportunity because it means your work has an audience
that cares; it is also a great burden because it means your work has an audience
that cares.
Readings for the course:
By now you should know that you CANNOT become a strong writer without reading in a deeper way than most people do. Creative writers need different—and stronger—ways of reading. All the great writers began as great readers. Writers have to experience the greatest depths of pleasure and pathos in reading before they can even know what to aim for as writers. But at the same time, writers read (and re-read) opportunistically, i.e. with a need, a hunger, a willingness to use, absorb, learn, and/or steal. Reading as a writer means studying the craft.
In this class there will be regular assigned readings and you must write response logs to them. All the logs that you write will be posted in a forum so that your peers can see them. Ideally, these forums will evolve into dialogues about literature. The goal is not just appreciation of literature for its own sake but for what makes it work, its techniques.
We will discuss literature by primarily contemporary writers:
* to appreciate the craft, forms, and techniques of poetry better....
* to give you the specific vocabulary (more advanced literary terms) to discuss writing....
* to inspire you to experiment....
* to increase your ability to see other perspectives and interpret other styles/aesthetics....
* and to help you understand and appreciate who the competition is!
The goal of workshop dialogues is to help you gain more independence about aesthetic decisions. The class helps you see the real consequences of each choice you make. In contrast to the ideas, positions, values of others, you must develop for yourself the insight and skills to overcome your own aesthetic, philosophical, technical, political and/or generic problems. Workshop participation is where you actually do much of the learning that happens in this class. It can be great fun, but it can also be extraordinarily hard work for your intellect and emotions.
We will be in ongoing workshops (using small groups of 4-6 people).
In this workshop, you read everything by the peers in another group and respond by writing comments online. The way you discuss the work of your peers is graded as participation in the workshop. I will evaluate how well you are responding to your peers. The benefit here is that everyone takes the job of responding more seriously because it is a large part of your grade, 30%. You will help each other more and, ultimately, become more independent as writers. Everyone will get more and better feedback this way. Also, I will respond to your work myself after reading the comments of your peers.
As a writer in a workshop, you learn to more effectively focus on those areas where your work needs critical attention. You learn to do what real writers do for each other—you form literary friendships or literary understandings of each other. Almost nothing can strengthen a writer's work more than finding a reader who actually understands what he/she is saying.
As an example, if there were twelve people there could be two groups of six which would respond to each other. The number and form of the groups may vary depending on the needs of the individuals in the class.
In a typical unit, first one group(s) of the class will submit to a workshop forum a poem or a fragment of a longer poem (the maximum length is 35-70 lines). When it is your turn to present, you must post your work by the posting deadline (or it will be deleted). It is also strongly suggested that you post a question or a concern about your own work. Then your peers will discuss your work, starting with your own question, and you cannot reply to anything anyone writes!
NOTE: If anyone writes anything inappropriate, I can delete it as soon as it comes to my attention.
After the responses from your peers are done, I will respond also. THEN you may respond to anything that has been written about your work, if you like. Your peers may ask open-ended questions, and you can answer these or ignore these as you like.
Then in the next unit, those who submitted last time would be responding, and those who responded would be submitting, and so on.
If you miss your submission (or posting) deadline for any reason, you will not receive any feedback during that unit.
If you miss your responding deadlines, no late feedback will count toward your participation.
Note that because this is an Independent Study, you will be put in groups with other people who agree to go at the same pace along with you.
There will be two options:
(i) a fast track—writing new poetry or responding to others' poems every week so that the course could end in as little as 12 weeks.
(ii) a slow track—writing new poetry and responding to others' poems every month so that the course could take a full year.Once you commit to a track, you have to keep going at that pace until you are done. There will be deadlines that you must meet regularly.
FOR THE GROUP MEMBERS THERE IS AN OPTION TO SUBMIT EXTRA POEMS:
If you are very highly motivated and you want to submit a poem to me every other week just for my response, i.e. during the weeks when you are not submitting to the workshop, you may send extra poems to me. These may be revisions of poems that you presented in the workshop forum, or they may be poems that you only want to show to me. If you take this option, you will get feedback on 12 poems during the course. This will almost certainly strengthen your final portfolio.
Our goal is to create a comfortable environment for sharing work, so please follow these guidelines whether you are in the tutorial or the group version of this course.
When you present work:
(i) Bring new work whenever possible.
Recycling old work almost always results in slower progress and less actual
learning. Significant revisions of earlier work, however, are often a good thing
to present to class.
(ii) Always bring at least one question about your work whenever
you present anything.
If you are still evolving as a writer, you should have at least some doubt in
your mind about some part of any new work. It is not as productive to bring
old works about which you feel completely certain. (If you are sure it is perfect,
you won't need, or want, any help.)
(iii) Decide what you hope to accomplish with a work before
you bring it to workshop.
You can help your peers get to the heart of the work if you think it through
beforehand instead of abdicating all responsibility and depending on everyone
else to decide what you have accomplished or failed to accomplish.
(iv) NEVER ask others to rewrite your work — your work is always your responsibility.
When you are responding:
(i) Try to discern the writer's goals before you judge how successful
the work is.
One has to know what a work is trying to do before one can judge if it works;
one must
understand the needs of the work before one can constructively critique it.
(ii) Try not to prescribe remedies for someone else's work.
This puts a writer in the position of a patient or, worse, a disease. Even though
many ask for such treatment (imagining the short-term pain will be worth the
long-term gain), any one standard that forecloses dialogue deprives someone
of her/his chance to think creatively through the work.
(iii) Try to be as honest as possible but be aware of others'
feelings....
(iv) NEVER rewrite others' work in your own voice....
(v) NEVER assume that any work is autobiographical....
Even if a writer says, "This really happened," we will discuss the
work without reference to anyone's "real life." But we will ask about
the verisimilitude (or the life-like quality) of the work because readers need
to willingly suspend their disbelief. Just because something really did happen
does not mean it is credible.
SUMMARY OF COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
(i) Write and present new work for every other unit of the course (generally that means 12 poems in 12 weeks or 12 months). In the end, you must submit a final portfolio of works (5-10 poems.) More than half of this work MUST have appeared in the workshop, and all of it should be revised. Grades are competitive (ABCDF).
50% OF TUTORIAL FINAL GRADE. [OR 40% OF FINAL GRADE IN THE GROUP VERSION OF THE COURSE.]
(ii) Respond in writing on others' drafts. Your workshop participation
reflects your development as a writer within a community and your depth as a
critical reader of the works of others. Grades here are on a 10 point scale,
i.e. doing nothing to respond is worth 0 points. Responding thoughtfully, insightfully,
and thoroughly is worth 10 points. (Examples are provided.)
NOT PART OF THE TUTORIAL [30% OF FINAL GRADE IN THE GROUP VERSION OF THE COURSE.]
(iii) Read great poems and write about and discuss them. Reading
response logs are required HW. (These also are worth 10 points per log (Examples
of strong response logs will be provided throughout the term.)
50% OF TUTORIAL FINAL GRADE. [30% OF FINAL GRADE IN THE GROUP VERSION OF THE COURSE.]