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Welcome to The Teaching of Creative Writing |
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Welcome to E614, The Teaching of Creative Writing! I'll be using this space for news, updates, announcements, and comments regarding class assignments and discussion. 5/27--Thank you all for a wonderful semester! Final portfolios are in Lisa Greggo's office, W-6-66. MFA students can find them in their student mailbox. Those with SASEs went in the mail today. 5/6: Class evaluations will be done in class tonight. Please disregard the Cavitt and Pridgeon pedagogy papers; they were listed on the syllabus in error. 4/22 Here's a link to sound poetry by Tracie Morris: <http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Morris.html> 4/15
4/8: Elizabeth McCracken reads at 4:00 pm in Point Lounge, 3rd fl CC. Since some of you have begun posting pedagogy papers, we'll go over their structure in class. ONLY your pedagogy papers on specific classroom exercises need to be posted on the website. Pamela Nisetich asked if the theory/pedagogy article responses papers could be written on a chapter in the Leahy or Ritter/Vanderslice text not assigned in the syllabus. Please see me first if you'd like to do that. 4/1Hope you enjoyed the video—we’ll spend some time next class going over your comments and questions. For April 1, I’d like you to bring in the following for our class discussion on poetic meter and poetic form: 1. a list of 10 two syllable words, hyphenated 2. a list of 10 three syllable words, hyphenated 3. a limerick (one you create or one you find elsewhere) “Poetry is memorable speech”—W.H. Auden
Some readers think of poetry as a puzzle, or a game, or a fancy way of saying something that could be said more simply. In fact poetry is the most economical way to communicate what is almost unsayable in its complexity (“embody contrary feelings in the same motion,” as Donald Hall puts it). More so than prose, poetry relies on structures of sound and rhythm to communicate not just to the thinking brain but to the body itself. Rhyme and meter are two techniques poetry uses to establish like and unlike patterns that the mind listens for and the body unconsciously responds to.
Our first poems are songs—lullabies—and nursery rhymes. Everyone has likely experienced the pleasure of the sound and metrical pattern of (CONTINUED IN RESOURCES, WEEK 9)
3/25: For an interview with fiction writer Mary Gaitskill, including her reading from her short story "Don't Cry," go to http://slatev.com/player.html?id=17314033001 2/25: Here is a link to Bloom's Taxonomy, which is the pyramid of questioning that is meant to deepen thinking and comprehension:
Margaret Atwood¹s "February" begins with two sentence fragments. Emily Dickinson¹s eccentric punctuation and capitalization make her poems grammatically ambiguous. Mark Twain¹s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was banned from Boston and Concord libraries because Huck¹s dialect and substandard grammar were considered a bad influence on YA readers. English spelling wasn¹t standardized until the 18th century. "All right" has become "Alright." Although sentences aren¹t supposed to end with a preposition, "There are some things up with which I will not put" is a travesty. In Donald Hall's poem "To A Waterfowl," the writer meets businessmen on planes "who close their briefcases and ask, 'What are you in?'/ I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry,/and their eyes fill with anxiety, and with little tears./'Oh, yeah?' they say, developing an interest in clouds./.../ I guess maybe I'd better watch my grammar, huh?'" As teachers our job is to make students comfortable with writing--not anxious, watching their grammar, 2/18: You'll find a list of local poetry readings through 3/11 below.For a list of fiction readings, go to the website for E210-5 (Lily Rabinofrf-Goldman) and click on the link on her home page. Here are some of your comments on your chosen examples of good writing. What qualities can we generalize from these statements? From the posted work you've read? [Good writing]…unpack(s) lots of information in a precise and concise manner. To me, good writing is honest, creative, and individual…Growing up, I always thought that good writing had to be wordy, including many words I could barely understand, with long and exhausting sentences. Good writing breathes life into characters and squarely places the reader into their lives and particular situations. There is an actual physical feeling that accompanies reading and thinking about these books, a shifting in my chest, as though I am being opened up, allowed full contact not simply with the written words or story but admitted to the universe where fiction is as real and as necessary as the other food I eat. Dickinson called poetry a feeling akin to the top of her head being taken off. This piece is exactly that for me, only does so with a chainsaw. Just like falling in love, good writing takes us by surprise. …what I admire most: work that’s both happy and sad. It feels balanced, and leaves me happy and sad. A good piece of writing captures the reader’s interest and holds it. It makes the reader want to go back after reading it the first time and read the piece all over again. This…is a piece of good writing because, simply put, it is fun to read. Concrete images of sight, sound, and sensibility draw the reader in…. Language is experience…. The “story” or “plot” is not new or original—but the way in which [the author] tells it makes it new. No other media besides language has been so deeply ingrained in human existence, filling every part of our lives and corresponding even to our very thoughts…[Good writing] consider(s) the concepts of language and meaning during the writing process. …that [this poem] can be so inviting and so deceptively complicated is I think one of the hallmarks of a great poem—it can be picked up and read, with a positive reaction to the content on an aesthetic level, or it can be further delved into.
2/4: Correction! the updated url for the John Gardner article is: <http://www.gargoylemagazine.com/gargoyle/Issues/scanned/issue11/gardner.htm> 2/4: Meet in W-6-47. Some notes I've made for a panel discussion, "Teaching Our Students to Teach Creative Writing," at AWP's annual conference: So what are the objectives of a creative writing course not limited to the gifted and talented, but useful to every student who enrolls? We teach students to “read like a writer,” asking not “what it means” but “how meaning is made.” Literature classes reflect Robert Hass’ comment that “all writing is about denied aspects of self and culture,” and use critical methods to reveal what those aspects are—a useful intellectual task. In creative writing classes we address aesthetic questions: how is meaning effectively created and communicated? We teach contemporary literature, using a diversity of texts not as models to follow but as examples of the lively, infinite ways to proceed. We cherish the imagination and invest students with authority. In a 1989 interview with Mike Pride, the writer Jane Kenyon answered a question about her status as “junior poet” in a household that included her husband, Donald Hall: “…Don is at the point in his career where he’s getting to be thought of as quite a statesman of poetry, someone with a lot of answers. And he is someone with a lot of answers. He knows things nobody else knows. But I also know things nobody else knows. It’s funny how everything in your life, every experience, everything in your reading, everything in your thinking, in your spiritual life—you bring it all to your work when you sit down to write. And he knows what he knows and I know what I know…” Everyone knows things nobody else knows. Teaching creative writing is a political act, placing authority within each student rather than outside. We teach a process that makes our students better writers through attention to language and detail, revision, and by the consideration they bring to the work of their peers, aka Craft. We also school them in the habits writers cultivate, such as writing every day, in class our out. So: In order of importance; Imagination, Voice, Reading and Craft. AREA POETRY READINGS Thursday, April 9, 6 pm Thursday, April 9, 7- 9 pm Thursday, April 9, 6:30 pm Friday, April 10, 7 pm Friday, April 10, 8 pm Saturday, April 11, 10:30 am Saturday, April 11, 2 - 5 pm Saturday, April 11, 7 pm Monday, April 13, 11 am Tuesday, April 14, 7 pm Wednesday, April 15, 11 am Thursday, April 16, 7:30 pm Friday, April 17, 8 pm Saturday, April 18, 6 pm Monday, April 20, 7 pm Monday, April 20, 7 pm Tuesday, April 21, 7:30 pm Tuesday, April 22, 6 pm Tuesday, April 21, 7:30 pm Wednesday, April 22, 7 pm Saturday, April 25, 3pm Sunday, April 26, 3 pm Sunday, April 26, 3 pm Sunday, April 26, 2 pm Monday, April 27, 8 pm Monday, April 27, 8 pm Tuesday, April 28, 7 pm Saturday, May 2, 6 pm Sunday, May 3, 1 pm Sunday, May 3, 3 pm Monday, May 4, 7 pm Monday, May 4, 8 pm Wednesday, May 6, 12 pm Thursday, May 7, 4 pm Friday, May 8, 8 pm Saturday, May 9, 3 pm Tuesday, May 12, 7 pm Saturday, May 16, 6 pm
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