MIND 288: 011 CONTEMPORARY ARTS CONNECTIONS
MW 5:30—6:45 p.m. CAND 2375 Reg# 2447
updated 04/19/06
Dr. Jeffrey Ethan Lee
Office: Ross 1170A
Hrs: MWF 10:45—12:15 p.m and MW 6:45—7:15 p.m. and by arrangement.
Phone: (970) 351-1476 / e-mail: jeffrey.lee@unco.edu
website: www.unco.edu/poetry/jeffrey.lee
Intro to the course:
This class includes poets, writers, musicians, fine artists, photographers, film makers, actors, dancers, and people from a variety of other disciplines. It is an ideal mix in many ways, and so I hope that you will seriously explore the various ways poets, writers, artists, film directors, and composers have responded to times of war and crises of various kinds. I also want to make it clear immediately that even if you are not an artist of any kind, you can choose to do:
*a creative final project for this class if you are willing to collaborate with others across disciplines in the arts.
*a collaborative research project about a significant writer, poet, film director, artist, composer of the last hundred years (i.e. twentieth and twenty-first century).
*a solo research project in the arts or upon a major figure.
(If you want to do a research project, you have to be able to find a dozen secondary sources on the figure or artist or artwork.)
Together, we will study some exemplary artistic works of fiction, poetry, film, art, and music.
GRADES:
Response logs & Quizzes = 25%
Attendance & participation = 25%
1 final project that we agree upon = 25%
Final exam = 25%
NOTE: more than 4 unexcused absences may lower overall your grade. Excessive lateness(es) may also count as absence. Late papers drop a whole grade for each class missed. Lastly, make-up HW logs, quizzes, and projects are only possible if an absence is excused by a prior agreement in writing.
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Here are the main works that we will explore together as well as a tentative time line for the course. Some assignments may be added or subtracted and some elements of the schedule may change as the term progresses as guest speakers become available.
Week 1: 01/09—11
M Intro to course. First readings assigned for Wednesday: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (novel): first 2 chapters.
W Discuss readings & some literary terms.
HW for next Wednesday: send a Bio note via e-mail.
Week 2: 01/16—20
M UNC closed!
W Finish Vonnegut. Discuss readings & some literary terms.
Quiz #1: 5 easy questions if you were paying attention while you were reading.
Week 3: 01/23—25
M See Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory
W Finish Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and discuss....
Week 4-6: 01/30—02/01 & 02/06—08 & 02/13—15
Finish Kubrick, start The Deer Hunter
Response log #1 on Kubrick due 02/06 Monday evening.
Read before Feb.6 The Deer Hunter script online at http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Deer-Hunter,-The.html
Response log #2 on The Deer Hunter due 02/15.
Week 7: 02/20—22
M Yusef Komunyakaa (war poetry & related poetry)
Keep reading Komunyakaa, pages: 8-12, 24-26, 28-33, 64, 71, 74, 77, 96, 129-159, 176-177. See the online resources link. Discussion of his works.
W Yusef Komunyakaa (war poetry & related poetry)
Identifications Quiz #2 on 5 excerpts.
Week 8: 02/27—03/01
M Yusef Komunyakaa (war poetry & related poetry)
Identifications Quiz #3 on 5 more excerpts.
W Yusef Komunyakaa reads in the UNC Writers Conference week! Attendance required at 7 p.m. Note: the 5:30 p.m. class is cancelled so people have time to go to the reading!
Week 9: 03/06—08
Jake York’s Murder Ballads (poetry)
Identifications Quiz #4 on 5 excerpts.
[AWP Writers Conference]
Spring
Break March 13-17
Week 10: 03/20—22
Monday discuss Muder Ballads. HW log due.
Wednesday Jake York visits our class. Please read this in terview!
http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v4n1/features/york_ja_100105/interview_text.htm
Here is info on Leadbelly for "Release."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadbelly#The_Prison_Years_until_.22Discovery.22_by_Lomax
Here is info on "Elegy for Little Girls."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_Street_Baptist_Church_bombing
Optional EC HW log on any York poem; these EC logs must refer to the interview as well as a poem.
Week 11: 03/27—29
Lecture/discussion of Kahlo (paintings, photo images, biography) and Salvador Dali’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War and his relation to Surrealism.
03/29 Response log #3 on Kahlo.
Meanwhile, here is a link to a great site with free Dali images.
http://dali.uffs.net/galerie/galerie.ascii.php
Meanwhile, here is a link to a nice overview of Dali's life and career.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dali
Week 12: 04/03—05
Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale
Optional response log #5 on Dali.
Weeks 13—15
04/10—12
M Discussion of final (materials of course reviewed) and final prompt discussed.
W Tricia Dienstfrei & Kasey Christel present songs from the Civil Rights Era, with the help of Sara Franklin. In Frasier 249.
04/17—19
M Patrick Olsen and Rebecca Job & Mariah McGlothlin
April 17 Author Thad Rutkowski visits class and does an Evening Reading at 7:30 p.m. in Lindou Auditorium. Attendance strongly recommended!
W In Frasier 249
Joya Moore on music and the wars that America has experienced from the Civil War to
the present.
Nicole Rice presents a response to "Camouflaging the Chimera" by Yusef Komunyakaa.
04/24—26
M Sara W, Erycka G, Rebecca R, & Amanda S, Lindsay J, Kiyomi H., & Colin M and Robert G.
Milne Auditorium reserved. (Cancel this?)
W Tom E, Derek H, Eryl, Justin C, Gary V, Ed D. & Nicole R. In Frasier 249
Finals Week May 1-5
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For those of you who are currently studying or interested in studying a discipline in the arts, I strongly encourage you to explore ways in which different arts can inform and help each other.
One of the most profound experiences I ever had in the arts came about due to the Asian Arts Initiative of Philadelphia. They were sponsoring collaborative projects between artists of different kinds. To be honest, I did not think it was such a great idea at first, but I knew a great Japanese-American percussionist from many years before who was also participating. So I asked Toshi Makihara to work with me on a poetry-music collaboration in which I’d tell a story in poetry of when a young guy tried to kill me at a subway station in Brooklyn, and Toshi agreed to help me to create the musical atmosphere for the work. I explained that my main intention was to convey the experience as accurately and honestly as I could, and he was very inspired by the work.
We began to collaborate with the idea of helping to express what was already in the language. But the further that we got into the project, the more that I realized that Toshi’s musical improvisations and compositions were enabling me to go far beyond what was “expected” in narrative poetry. We never explicitly talked about drama, but Toshi had worked with theater companies and composed music for theatrical productions. His way of performing himself was also extremely dramatic—he had always been one of the best percussionists I’d ever seen. (He has had more Grammy nominations for his own jazz improvisation works.) Ultimately, my whole way of thinking about the work shifted toward a much more “dramatic” idea so that it became more like a play than a story, and I found myself recollecting my own experiences with theater more and more as I revised the work to include more and more different voices and characters.
After a series of duo performances, another friend who was an actress got involved in the project, and in many later performances she would act out the parts written for many others in what was now “the script.” We now had a “trio” doing a dramatic “performance” sort of like a radio play. That is, we weren’t acting with our bodies but with our voices and with music.
To make a long evolution brief, we ended up performing identity papers a dozen times with a generous grant from the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, and one of the live recordings got into the hands of a record producer who wanted to create a CD, which became a Grammy nominee in 2002, and this fall (2006) it is appearing as a full-length poetry book from Ghost Road Press, one of the best literary presses in the West.