Length: at least 450 words
• Here you are on our class blog. Log in to contribute. If it doesn’t want to let you post to the blog, email me and remind me to add you as a contributor!
• Make your first blog entry. In that entry, please spend at least 450 words answering the following questions:
• What are you studying, and why do you like it?
• Where are you from, and what’s it like there?
• Aside from writing, what are your interests and hobbies?
• Have you had good or bad experiences getting feedback on your work? What were they?
• Who are your influences? Name some poets, living or dead, whose work you admire (and try to articulate what you admire about them). A poet you detest can also be an influence--if you can articulate how you want to write differently from him.
• What’s good about good poetry?
• What do you hope to learn in this class? (Don’t be lame and say, “I want to learn to write better poems.” Be more specific than that.)
• Don't forget that you also need to bring a written response to the workshop checklist to class Tuesday--we'll be running a practice workshop on Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnet IV."
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Blogging for Techniques of Poetry
You can create a new post by clicking on "new post" in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, or by clicking "new post" under English 242A in your blogger.com dashboard. Posting your posts as posts, rather than as comments, is really better--because then people can comment on your posts!
The blog is a curious, hybrid form--somewhere between private journaling and public journalism--so it’s fitting that in this course it fulfills a couple of different functions. To a certain extent, you can treat the course blog as a kind of writing journal--a place where you make note of ideas, images, sounds, and notions that are exerting influence on your creative life, where you articulate questions you hope to write through, where early drafts of your poems first coalesce. At the same time, though, this blog is a shared space, one in which you place your ideas in dialogue with your peers’. It’s a space where you can do a kind of thinking “aloud”--where you can collaborate, brainstorm, debate, support and challenge one another. It’s an informal extension of the classroom discussion space, and a jumping-off point from which you (individually or as a group) can also get involved in the larger literary debates bouncing around the poetry blogosphere. Printing out your and others’ recent contributions to the blog and bringing them to class with you may also help you organize your thoughts and participate more meaningfully in our discussions.
Each week, please contribute 200 words to the class blog before class time on Tuesday--unless otherwise directed. For example, this week I’d like you to contribute 450 words. This week I’m asking you some questions to get your blogging started, but usually you’ll be free to write about whatever you’d like (as long as it’s related to class discussion, to your outside reading about poetic discussions, or to your creative writing life). Responding to your classmates’ posts can be a great way to avoid writer’s block and to keep the conversation rolling!
Please remember that the blog is a public forum. Don’t write anything here you’re not okay with your professors, your grandma, and your future employers reading. Broaching touchy, tense, or vexed topics is okay and even encouraged--and feel free to be completely honest--but remember to do so with respect.