For the Week of Jan. 28 and Tue., Feb. 4

1.      Write about one of the essays, or two sections that speak in relation to one another, from Poetics Journal. Focus on a few key passages and discuss these in terms of their relevance or importance to thinking about the relation between theory and writing, or the philosophical and the practical, for example. How you go about doing this is totally up to you. Write 1-2 pages.

2.      Use the pieces on Dahlen (the essay from the text, “Forbidden Knowledge”; the selection from Dahlen’s A Reading, and my short piece to help contextualize) and write a 2-3 page creative piece of your own which incorporates material from 2-3 (or more) sources. Dahlen’s use of sources (Freud and etc) is subtle and may or not be recognizable. Think about the possibilities for doing intertextuality by reading, appropriating, cutting, pasting, interpreting, responding, etc. to sources in your own creative writing. Again, how and what it looks like is totally up to you.

These two pieces of writing are due by Noon next Tue, Feb. 4. Post these to your blog, read each others’ before class time on Tue., and bring hard copies to share and discuss in class. You can write comments on each others’ posts but it is not required, though read and come thinking about your own and others’ writing.

In class next week we’ll discuss Hejinian’s “Rejection of Closure” (the pdf, which is a little different from the one in the book) and these readings
from Poetics Journal (Bernstein, Dahlen, Watten, Harryman) as well as Scalapino (270), Sonbert (289), Alferi (303). You will want to plan ahead so you can read the new essays as well as each others’ blog posts before class on Tue.

Think about the following for our discussion in class: poetics (as described in the intro and in terms of how you see these essays as “poetics”; the relation between theorizing and writing (praxis?); form, genre, narrative, non/narrative, style, construction and other textual and material elements addressed in the readings; how you are thinking about any of this in your own work.

We’ll also look at some examples of projects, work, and writing that crosses genre boundaries, thinks about form and structure and narrative and etc.