Spring 2008

The American Poet -- A Reading Course for Writers
Marie Howe
WRT 380 (66350)
Monday, 2:00-5:00
Frank Dobie House

What does it mean to us to be writing poetry within the American Culture? Cultures? Empire? What is the chamber? ( by whom is it haunted? ) To where goes the open road? What is the song? Who sang it before this? To whom does it sing? And to what world? ( This world now? ) How does it approach the Unspeakable? How does it mean what it says? Might the How be the What as well? How can we hear it with so many voices talking? And what does it matter?
Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hart Crane, Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, Tony Hoagland, Kenneth Koch, Jane Kenyon, Yusef Komunyakaa ,Li-Young Li, Larry Levis, Alice Notley, Paisley Rekdal, Jean Valentine, Kevin Young may be be among the authors we’ll read closely. You can expect to come to every class, to read a book a week ( often with additional essays), to meet with another member of our class each week, and to write creative and critical responses. We might expect some guest appearences. I ask for your passionate participation.

POETRY WORKSHOP - Breaking Through
Marie Howe
WRT 380 (66355)
Tuesday, 4:00-7:00 p.m.
J. Frank Dobie House

We’ll meet in a workshop each week where we’ll generate poems, and read and critique each other’s work. Each week you’ll bring in a freshly written poem, closely read the poems written by others , and meet with another member of our class in a “poetry date”. We’ll encourage each other to write beyond where we would end - to break through boundaries of thought, feeling, syntax, diction, rhythm, image, forms - to write poems that astonish us. Each member of our class will meet with me within the first three weeks -- bring to that meeting a half dozen poems. And bring to our first class meeting, a poem by someone else you wish you had been able to write - 15 copies. We’ll work hard, help each other, and have a wonderful time.

Playwriting Workshop
Sharon Kramer
WRT 380 (66360)
Wednesday, 2:00-5:00
WIN 1.130

VISUAL METAPHOR
A writing workshop
How it blossoms inside the spectator.  What it does when it gets there.  Why we passionately need it and go to the theatre to get it.  Why nothing else quite does it.  How we go about filling it up and letting it spill out into our work and audiences.  How it has everything and nothing to do with the word "image."  .

Playwriting Studies Course
Sharon Kramer
WRT 380 (66345)
T TH, 11:00-12:30
Frank Dobie House

THE PERCEPTION SHIFT
A play happens inside us. In our apprehension it comes alive and vital and complete. It does not impose any context except the context of our own perceptions--the bare minimum necessary for any investigation. A play exists only in terms of itself and it literally creates those terms whole, from the ground up, as it creates itself. The rules which govern a universe are only available to us after that universe is created.
 
In the end, the place where a play happens is not on stage, but in the eye and heart and mind of the spectator, in that space or in that energy or as the relationship that is created between the audience and the play.
“Just the ordering of our perceptions is capable of carrying the form and essence of art.  Dramatic action is our sense that something significant has happened, and what has happened is our own mental activity.  Dramatic action is a metaphorical term for the effect which is our subjective experience.”
  Okkie Brownstein

We'll be investigating a text almost every class period, mostly plays, but also essays, poems, and perhaps a screenplay and novel.  The question of how art is and is not a moral instrument will be asked often.  Work for the class will range from short assignments to class presentations.