English 709 Summer Session I: Reading & Writing Poems: Person, Place, & Voice
Pamela Gemin 225 Radford Hall 424-2260 geminp@uwosh.edu
Office Hours 12-1 p.m. M-Th & by appointment
Texts
Cornelius Eady, Brutal Imagination
Bob Hicok, Animal Soul
Ryan Van Cleave, ed., Contemporary American Poetry: Behind the Scenes
C. D. Wright, Deepstep Come Shining
other poems & essays online, on e-reserve, or photocopied
Important Websites
Academy of American Poets
Poetry Daily
Course Description
English 709 is a workshop-format course that incorporates lecture and discussion. It is also a
process-oriented course in which students first read and discuss poems (and some essays) by
established poets, draft their own poems, and offer them for peer review in both large and small
group workshops. After poems have been workshopped, they are submitted to the professor for
another round of feedback and returned to students for revision. Revisions are typically made
with peer and professor feedback in mind, and at the end of the course students submit a
portfolio of revised poems and process notes along with a self-evaluation. Student readings
(held after peer review and before professor review) are also an important part of the course.
Each poet’s section in CAP includes process notes, or narrative descriptions of the poet’s
terrain—both technical and emotional—on the way to a poem. They simply tell the story of the
poem’s making—what was most natural and most difficult about writing the draft? What arose
that was unexpected? What got cut or rebuilt, and why? How did the workshop group help to
shape the poem?
Workshops
Rarely do students experience undue criticism or insensitivity in workshop; most students want
their classmates to do well and almost all want to learn from each other’s work. While largegroup workshops are run on a volunteer basis, small-group workshops are required for each
draft. Written guidelines will be presented for workshop groups. All are expected to participate
fully, but none should dominate. Specific and constructive criticism, as well as praise, is a
healthy part of this course, and students who can separate themselves from their work, remaining
open to readers’ informed suggestions, will benefit most from workshop.
Workshops give drafts a wide look first, and then zoom in to specific areas. Because the aim of
any workshop is to provide writers with an immediate response from readers who do not have
access to a backstory or knowledge of the writer’s intent, writers are asked to remain silent until
the end of the workshop, when they can ask for clarification of readers’ suggestions. The final
version of a poem must speak for itself.
Classroom Etiquette
Cell phones should be turned off during class and students are discouraged from walking in and
out of the classroom except for in emergencies. Students are expected to bring their books and
other materials to class, to get to class on time, and to be fully prepared for workshops—
workshop guidelines sheet and double-spaced copies in hand—when they walk in the door.
Two assignments (poetry drafts and process notes) may be submitted late. Late work is due the
next class period. If an assignment is late for Thursday it should be submitted on Friday—no
exceptions.
E-Mail
Most professors prefer in-person conversations with students to a continuing series of e-mail
exchanges, as it’s extremely difficult to keep up with the sheer volume of e-mails they receive
daily. E-mail conversations have their limitations, and e-mail exchanges can lead to
misinterpretations and misunderstandings between students and professors. Ask questions in
class, take advantage of office hours, and make appointments instead. Late work in hard copy
form is preferable to e-mail attachments.
Attendance
Two absences are allowed, but regular attendance is very important, especially on workshop
days. Missing more than two classes will lower the final grade; missing four or more will
constitute failure regardless of coursework completed. Administrative and/or medical
documentation is required to demonstrate exceptional circumstances. Students should not feel
compelled to report their reasons for missing class as long as absences remain within the allowed
range. However, since participation counts in 709, being in class counts.
Course Evaluation
Final Grades are based on the components below, each worth 50%:
● workshopping, workshop etiquette, preparation and engagement (grade recommended in selfevaluation)
● final portfolio: 4 revised poems with their original drafts attached, process notes, and selfevaluation (grade assigned by professor)
Tentative Syllabus
A tentative course timeline follows. A day-by day schedule will be furnished on Monday of
each week.
Week One, June 11-14: Introductory questions, essays, and poems. Discuss poems in the first
person and “collective” first person (Whitman’s “containing multitudes”), self-portrait poems,
persona poems from CAP and elsewhere. Read Brutal Imagination and related materials.
Assignments: first person poem/self-portrait poem/persona poem. Workshop #1.
Week Two, June 18-21: Introduction to place—poems of place and landscape (inner and outer)
from CAP and elsewhere, related materials. C.D. Wright and Deepstep. Assignment: poem of
place. Workshop #2.
Week Three, June 25-29: Introduction to voice and its features—deeply “voiced” poems in CAP
and elsewhere. Bob Hicok and Animal Soul. Assignment: Hicok-inspired poem.
Week Four, July 2, 3, & 5: Combining the aspects. Assignment: final poem with attention to
person, place and voice.
PERSON
Week One, June 11-14: Who’s Talking, Who’s Reading?
persona, point of view, identity, and responsibility
Please print all e-reserve essays and online materials and bring them to class.
for T-12: Find two first-person and/or persona poems in CAP that you’d be comfortable reading aloud and leading a
discussion on; mark them with post-its and be ready to volunteer. Think about how these poems would be altered if
written from a different point of view. Talk about Poem #1 (workshop #1 on Th). Start thinking about ideas for Poem
#1, first person narrative, self-portrait, or persona poem. (Volunteers for large-group workshop on Th?)
for W-13, read and print “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America,” by June Jordan (on E-Reserve), and all of
the Cornelius Eady links listed for Brutal Imagination . Also, read and print Cate Marvin’s essay "Tell All the Truth
but tell it slant": First-Person Usage in Poetry” and Rachel Zucker’s Confessionalography: A GNAT (Grossly NonAcademic Talk) on "I" in Poetry
Cornelius Eady at the Academy of American Poets
Natasha Trethewey on Cornelius Eady
Village Voice article on Cornelius Eady
W-13: Discuss essays and articles; read Brutal Imagination aloud in class and discuss poems. Review workshop
guidelines.
for Th-14: Read and print Jane Hirshfield’s “Telescope, Well Bucket, Furnace: Poetry Beyond the Classroom,” from
The AWP Writers’ Chronicle Thom Ward’s “The Accomplished and the Insufficient: What Readers Should Expect
from a Poem,” from The Academy of American Poets site.
Th-14: Talk about “place,” and assign new readings. Review essays above. Workshop #1, large and small group.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Questions to Consider for “Person”
Who is the speaker?
Who is the writer?
Are they the same person? Separated twins? Or a two-headed beast?
If they are separated twins, what do they share: what histories, organs, visions?
If they are separated twins, what do they keep to themselves?
If they are (it is?) a two-headed beast, which head (left-right, east-west, north-south)
belongs to speaker and which to writer? Is one head larger than the other? Whose hoof
goes out first? Who is first at the trough?
Do writer and speaker imagine the same reader?
What does a reader bring to a poem? In what ways do writer and reader merge? If the
speaker/writer fits a metaphor above, what is a good metaphor for the reader?
The First Person: Me, Myself, and I
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Walt
Whitman “Either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” Derek Wolcott
Take the I Out
Sharon Olds
But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream
of Wheat, its curl of butter right
in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses
with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning
and sour in the evening. I love the I,
frail between its flitches, its hard ground
and hard sky, it soars between them
like the soul that rushes, back and forth,
between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,
how would it have felt to be the strut
joining the floor and roof of the truss?
I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years
in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled
slope of her temperature rising, and on
the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach
the crest, the Roman numeral I-I, I, I, I,
girders of identity, head on,
embedded in the poem. I love the I
for its premise of existence--our I--when I was
born, part gelid, I lay with you
on the cooling table, we were all there, a
forest of felled iron. The I is a pine,
resinous, flammable root to crown,
which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.
Self-Portrait As Runner Up
David Graham
I've never been a shoe-in. I'm always flappable,
and when I make a joke it's like fumbling
for change. My motto is Yes, But.
I'm everyone's third choice, and rightly so,
because I couldn't blaze a trail
in butter. Most of my twenties
I spent paging through catalogs,
my thirties struggling with a stuck zipper.
Now, in my cruise-control forties,
I seem to watch the weather channel
in my sleep. I've never gone
without saying. Believe me, I need
plenty of introduction. When the comet
everyone's mad about appears
in the northern sky, I see lint,
a dim and vaguely luminous idea,
celestial smudge on my glasses.
Still, more and more mornings I wake
and let the cracks and cobwebs
on the ceiling swim for a moment
in my blurred, dread-stirred eyes.
Then rise with a relish past fame
to tend a fire as common as it seems rare.
Personals
C.D. Wright
Some nights I sleep with my dress on. My teeth
are small and even. I don't get headaches.
Since 1971 or before, I have hunted a bench
where I could eat my pimento cheese in peace.
If this were Tennessee and across that river, Arkansas,
I'd meet you in West Memphis tonight. We could
have a big time. Danger, shoulder soft.
Do not lie or lean on me. I'm still trying to find a job
for which a simple machine isn't better suited.
I've seen people die of money. Look at Admiral Benbow. I wish
like certain fishes, we came equipped with light organs.
Which reminds me of a little known fact:
if we were going the speed of light, this dome
would be shrinking while we were gaining weight.
Isn't the road crooked and steep.
In this humidity, I make repairs by night. I'm not one
among millions who saw Monroe's face
in the moon. I go blank looking at that face.
If I could afford it I'd live in hotels. I won awards
in spelling and the Australian crawl. Long long ago.
Grandmother married a man named Ivan. The men called him Eve.
Stranger, to tell the truth, in dog years I am up there.
Lady Lazarus
Sylvia Plath
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?-The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot-The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart-It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Shiloh
Larry Levis
When my friends found after I’d been blown
Into the limbs of a tree, my arms were wide open.
It must have looked as if I were welcoming something.
Awakening to it. They left my arms like that,
Not because of the triumphant, mocking shape they took
In death, & not because the withheld breath
Of death surprised my arms, made them believe,
For a split second, that they were really wings
Instead of arms, & had always been wings. No, it was
Because, by the time the others had found me, I had been
Sitting there for hours with my arms spread wide,
And when they tried, they couldn’t bend them back,
Couldn’t cross them over my chest as was the custom,
So that the corpses that kept lining the tracks
Might look like sleeping choir boys. They were
No choir, although in death they were restored
To all they had been once. They were just boys
Fading back into the woods and ravines again.
I could see that much in the stingy, alternating light
And shade the train threw out as it began to slow,
And the rest of us gazed out from what seemed to me
One endless, empty window on what had to be.
What had to be came nearer in a sudden hiss of brakes,
The glass clouding with our reflections as we stood.
Arms and wings. They’ll mock you one way or the other.
adam thinking
lucille clifton
she
stolen from my bone
is it any wonder
i hunger to tunnel back
inside desperate
to reconnect the rib and clay
and to be whole again
some need is in me
struggling to roar through my
mouth into a name
this creation is so fierce
i would rather have been born
eve thinking
it is wild country here
brothers and sisters coupling
claw and wing
groping one another
i wait
while the clay two-foot
rumbles in his chest
searching for language to
call me
but he is slow
tonight as he sleeps
i will whisper into his mouth
our names
The Good Shepherd, Atlanta
Ai
I lift the boy's body
from the trunk,
set it down,
then push it over the embankment
with my foot.
I watch it roll
down into the river
and feel I'm rolling with it,
feel the first cold slap of the water,
wheeze and fall down on one knee.
So tired, so cold.
Lord, I need a new coat,
not polyester, but wool,
new and pure
like the little lamb
I killed tonight.
With my right hand,
that same hand that hits
with such force,
I push myself up gently.
I know what I'd likesome hot cocoa by the heater.
Once home, I stand at the kitchen sink,
letting the water run
till it overflows the pot,
then I remember the blood
in the bathroom
and so upstairs.
I take cleanser,
begin to scrub
the tub, tiles, the toilet bowl,
then the bathroom.
Mop, vacuum, and dust rag.
Work, work for the joy of it,
for the black boys
who know too much,
but not enough to stay away,
and sometimes a girl, the girls too.
How their hands
grab at my ankles, my knees.
And don't I lead them
like a good shepherd?
I stand at the sink,
where the water is still
overflowing the pot,
turn off the faucet,
then heat the water and sit down.
After the last sweet mouthful of chocolate
burns its way down my throat,
I open the library book,
the one on mythology,
and begin to read.
Saturn, it says, devours his children.
Yes, it's true, I know it.
An ordinary man, though, a man like me
eats and is full.
Only God is never satisfied.
En route, October 1910
Natasha Trethewey
I cannot now remember the first word
I learned to write — perhaps it was my name,
Ophelia, in tentative strokes, a banner
slanting across my tablet at school, or inside
the cover of some treasured book. Leaving
my home today, I feel even more the need
for some new words to mark this journey,
like the naming of a child — Queen, Lovely,
Hope — marking even the humblest beginnings
in the shanties. My own name was a chant
over the washboard, a song to guide me
into sleep. Once, my mother pushed me toward
a white man in our front room. Your father,
she whispered. He’s the one that named you, girl.
Father, February 1911
There is but little I recall of him — how
I feared his visits, though he would bring gifts:
apples, candy, a toothbrush and powder.
In exchange I must present fingernails
and ears, open my mouth to show the teeth.
Then I’d recite my lessons, my voice low.
I would stumble over a simple word, say
lay for lie, and he would stop me there. How
I wanted him to like me, think me smart,
a delicate colored girl — not the wild
pickaninny roaming the fields, barefoot.
I search now for his face among the men
I pass in the streets, fear the day a man
enters my room both customer and father.
Bellocq, April 1911
There comes a quiet man now to my room —
Papá Bellocq, his camera on his back.
He wants nothing, he says, but to take me
as I would arrange myself, fully clothed —
a brooch at my throat, my white hat angled
just so — or not, the smooth map of my flesh
awash in afternoon light. In my room
everything’s a prop for his composition —
brass spittoon in the corner, the silver
mirror, brush and comb of my toilette.
I try to pose as I think he would like — shy
at first, then bolder. I’m not so foolish
that I don’t know this photograph we make
will bear the stamp of his name, not mine.
Blue Book
June 1911
I wear my best gown for the picture —
white silk with seed pearls and ostrich feathers —
my hair in a loose chignon. Behind me,
Bellocq’s black scrim just covers the laundry —
tea towels, bleached and frayed, drying on the line.
I look away from his lens to appear
demure, to attract those guests not wanting
the lewd sights of Emma Johnson’s circus.
Countess writes my description for the book —
“Violet,” a fair-skinned beauty, recites
poetry and soliloquies; nightly
she performs her tableau vivant, becomes
a living statue, an object of art —
and I fade again into someone I’m not.