COURSE PLAN - ADVANCED POETRY WRITING – ENGLISH 491

Joy Passanante – Fall 2007

Joy’s home office: 882-1038, Joy’s Brink 203 office: 885-7128                      

joy@uidaho.edu      http://www.class.uidaho.edu/joy/

webpage for 491     http://www.class.uidaho.edu/eng491jp   

English department: 885-6156 (message)

Office Hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:30-3:00, and others by appointment.  I often adjust office hours but will let you know beforehand over the ether or in class. The best place to reach me is at my home office before 10 p.m. 

This is an advanced workshop course in which students will produce well-considered, carefully revised work that will be, by the semester’s close, clearly superior to that accomplished in the intermediate course.  Grading will be based on contributions in class, oral reports, journals and other assignments, and improvement as well as on polished work presented in the portfolio at the end of the semester.  All students will present their drafts and revisions in a folder and participate in an end-of–semester class reading.

Texts:  1. As a class we will read three books: Jab (Mark Halliday); Earthly Meditations (Wrigley), and The Best American Poetry 2007 (ed. Heather McHugh).   2. For in-class study and for use as models, additional texts will be individual poems that are student and instructor generate. We will read and discuss published poems that students bring to class as well as student poems in draft form.  3. Students will also choose seven contemporary books of poems (including one book by Donald Hall) to read on their own. At least three of them—in addition to the one by Hall--are to be by U.S. Poets Laureate.

Presentations: You will prepare and give a ten-minute presentation on one of the U.S. Poet Laureates.  Then you will lead a detailed analytical line-by-line discussion of a representative poem of your chosen poet. This presentation will be graded.

Conferences: At least two.

Poems to workshop: At least two. 

You are expected to produce a substantial body of poems: At least ten.

Journals: You will write a journal-page for six of the seven books you will be reading on your own. These will be collected, one each week, for six of poems of poems weeks.  Half of each one-page entry will be your response to/ideas about the book; the other half may be notes about your favorite lines or other random observations.

Class attendance and full participation:  Mandatory.  Three or more unexcused absences (signifying , of course, three entire weeks of class) may cause you to fail the course.

Attendance at the Halliday reading on September 26—and at all the visiting writers’ Wednesday readings. See the Creative Writing website for the updated readings schedule: www.class.uidaho.edu/english/CW/