|
AssignmentsFor April 9: Referring to the exercise on pg. 330 of Imaginative Writing, "Try This 9.13," choose one of these three alchemical elements: earth, water, fire, or air. Make a list as rapidly as you can of synonyms and connotations suggested by your chosen word. Begin a draft of a poem using your list, starting each line with "It is...." Bring your draft to class 4/9. Assignment 2: One short paper (3-5 pgs) in response to an aspect of pedagogical theory discussed in an article from Writer's Chronicle, on electronic reserve, or in an assigned chapter from Leahy or Ritter/Vanderslice. DUE MAY 14 but may be handed in at any time; your best strategy might be to write your response after the article has been discussed in class. Definition of response: your paper should outline the argument made by the author, and respond to the author's reasoning. You may extend the author's argument, using other texts and/or your own experience, or you may rebut the author's argument using the same resources. Several points of discussion include the role of the teacher in the classroom; the role of texts; the goals of a creative witing class; the role of the creative writing workshop. Assignment 3: Attendance at one poetry or fiction reading during the semester, with a brief 1-2 pg. written response. DUE MAY 14 but may be handed in at any time. Think of this paper as a review; below is a sample by a student from another class: UMass Boston Bookstore, 2/27/08 The UMass Boston writing department flexed its corporate muscle this afternoon with intense readings by two on its faculty, poet Joyce Peseroff and novelist/prose poet Joe Torra. Ostensibly it was a contrast between rural and urban, Peseroff waxing lyrical on New England country houses; Torra submitting dirges on the gritty streets of metropolitan Boston. Peseroff, however, is a city girl at heart, having grown up in Flushing and The Bronx, and she brings a city slicker’s eye to the happenings of her summer retreats: the nightlife of moths around a lamp, a radio playing low, paint peeling. Torra, on the other hand, handles his cityscapes with a Whitmanesque sweep. The landmarks and institutions tightly compressed into Boston’s radius are infused with a breath of the sort Whitman reserves for the treatment of his United States nation-scapes. Peseroff opened with a poem on the loss of the quaint in one of her rural homes. “Chamberland Road,” the poem was called—referring to the misspelling of the street where she resided. This of course brings to mind Bishop’s “Man Moth,” a clear influence; like Bishop, Peseroff is an imagist—and also like Bishop, she is a Wordsworthian. In a way she is a kind of converse, or antithesis, of the latter. Where he brought a country boy’s sensibility to London and Westminster Bridge, finding an epiphany in the still water of the Thames and the whole populace of the city sleeping like a mighty heart, Peseroff brings reference to the ruins of Rome and to commercially manufactured items, like a roll of Lifesavers, along with her eye for the busyness in the outwardly serene, to her descriptions of this village invaded by the bureaucratic niceties of suburbia. The one weak moment of the reading was an overly long introduction to a slight found-poem on the Farmer’s Almanac. The pace was quickly recovered, however, with a truly remarkable poem on a painter at the beach doing his art in the fog. Peseroff engages in wild and wonderful speculation as to what the artist seeks as a subject. I am reminded of a Charles Simic poem about a painter who paints at night, with candles stuck in his hat. One might counter that the two poets could not be more different, but they both have a sense of humor, and a sense of spectacle. The poem ended with the great line, “The ebb tide lifted the wild skirts of five emerald islands”—more evidence of spiritual kinship with Simic. Torra read an excerpt from his novel “They Say,” which recounts his mother’s life growing up, told form the point of view of an innocent eye. The narrator recounts the traumas of the family, a death by drowning, domestic abuse, mental illness. She also describes, in the simplest terms, the romantic and artistic aspirations of her brothers and sisters. It is reminiscent of something like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. To appropriate a comment of Cezanne’s on Monet, “Torra is just an eye, but my God, what an eye!” The trials and tribulations of this early-twentieth century family are run through a receptor so simple and impressionable, that they collide kaleidoscopically, and one can relate to them the daily joys and sufferings of any family. My favorite piece by Torra was his second, which he calls “an improvisation.” Written between the Decembers of 2006 and 2007, he says it is neither prose nor poem. At first glance one thinks Whitman or Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I think Torra’s true precursor, though, is the Lowell of “For the Union Dead.” Torra takes Lowell’s downtown and Common of 1964 forty years into the future and moves it to the North End, North Station, and the North Shore. I have lived and worked in that vicinity for 23 years, and it was with gritty tears and ecstasy that I heard him fly over the Schrafft’s building in Charlestown, the Spaulding Rehabilitation Center, and the Old North Church, with seagulls hovering around it. In Peseroff we watch the moths in their minute flights over furniture, into bedrooms and out onto the porch. Torra takes us with the gulls of Boston Harbor, as they map out the Shawmut Peninsula and the City on the Hill. Peseroff has inherited pearls from Emily Dickinson; Torra has repaved bridges Whitman walked. UMass Boston has true descendents and legatees of America’s finest. Assignment 4: 1) 3 one-page, single spaced pedagogy papers modeled on samples from the AWP Pedagogy forum (handouts with your syllabus) to be posted on the class website. DUE MAY 7 Pedagogy papers average 750-1000 words and propose methods of addressing student development through concrete, specific classroom exercises. They can be used for students at all levels, though the papers I’ve collected as models favor multi-age or undergraduate groups. The papers share a similar structure; they A. Present a specific issue in student writing to be addressed B. Discuss a procedure to follow involving
C. Explain how the exercise can be evaluated as successfully promoting learning
|
||||||||||||||
 |
