Christopher Bakken

Office: Oddfellows 220
Office Hours: M/W 9-11am; T/Th 10-11am

Tel: 332 4338
e-mail: cbakken@allegheny.edu

Course Overview:
The aim of this course is to familiarize students with the foundational components of verse construction: meter, scansion, stanza patterns and traditional forms. Though by no means exhaustive, the course will examine how these components fuse in the architecture of exemplary poems. We will consider the importance of historical context and convention--looking at works that began certain traditions in English verse--as well as the necessity of experimentation outside of those conventions. In addition to reading many quintessential and "master poems," students will experience the difficult and at times humbling processes of verse-composition first-hand, since they will be attempting to compose their own poems in traditional stanza patterns and traditional forms.

Required Texts:
Poetic Meter & Poetic Form by Paul Fussell ISBN: 0075536064 (Paperback) McGraw Hill
The Penguin Book of the Sonnet by Phillis Levin ISBN: 0140589295 (Paperback) Penguin
The Making of A Sonnet. Hirsch and Boland. ISBN: 0393333531 (Paperback) Norton
The Making of a Poem by Strand and Boland ISBN: 0 393 32178 9 (Paperback) Norton

Optional Texts:
Weighing Light by Geoffrey Brock. Ivan Dee. (Hardback). 1566636671

The Assignments

1) Writing Assignments
You will produce both in-class and at-home writing for this course. The in-class writing assignments will consist of essay examinations, at the midterm and final. These will be open-book examinations that will ask you to demonstrate what you have learned about the poems we have discussed in class. The at-home writing will consist of informal reader responses, formal essays, and poetry assignments. All at-home writing, including poems, should be typed, formatted according to MLA style, carefully proof-read and edited for grammar, spelling and style. Since poetry places a particular kind of pressure upon language-by virtue of its intensity and meticulous compression-it is crucial that your poems are edited as well as, if not even more fastidiously than your prose.

A note about poetry assignments: most of the poems you write for this course will be produced under unusual and rather extreme conditions. You have been given deadlines that will afford little time for inspiration, brooding or procrastination. The good news is that you will be responding to highly structured assignments; this should take some of the "creative pressure" off of you. Take these assignments very seriously (you'll certainly learn something if you do), but also think of them as exercises, not instant masterpieces. The due dates for each poetry assignment are inflexible. Late poems will not be accepted or considered and students who fail to turn in poems on time will risk the chance of failing the course.

2) Speaking
Though you will not be required to deliver any formal speeches in this course, participation in class discussion is mandatory. This includes answering questions as well as asking them; due to the difficult nature of this course, it will be up to you to alert the instructor in class when you are uncertain, confused or entirely bewildered. You should be prepared to lead discussion on any of the assigned readings for every class meeting. Simply skimming the required readings, thus, will not constitute adequate preparation for these meetings.

Evaluation

Your grade for this course will be determined as follows:
Class Participation: 15%
Paper One 20%
Paper Two 20%
Midterm 20%
Final 25%

Policies

Late Papers: This course will move fast, probably faster than you like. Assignments will quickly follow and/or overlap other assignments; it is therefore very important that you turn papers in on the day that they are due. Formal papers will be considered late fifteen minutes after the beginning of class on the due date (e.g. at 11:15). For every day late, beginning with the first, you will receive a half-letter grade deduction on your paper grade (thus, a B paper that is handed in at noon on the due date will receive a B-). If you need an extension on a paper, you must seek my approval well before that due date. No late poems will be accepted.

Attendance: In this course, there is no textbook to which you might retreat to make up for your absences. Much of the course material is created by the class in the classroom. For this reason, your attendance will be considered mandatory and more than four unexcused absences will adversely affect your grade for this course. More than seven unexcused absences will earn you an "F" for the course.

Course Calendar

PBS= The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Levin

MOP= The Making of a Poem, Strand and Boland
MOS= The Making of a Sonnet, Strand and Boland **=To Be Distributed

August
31 Course Introduction.
September

METER AND SCANSION
2 Read Fussell, ch. 1 & do Prose Conversion Exercise.

7 Read Fussell, ch. 2 & 3 & do Scansion Exercise.
9 Read Fussell, ch. 4 & 8. & do Case Study: "The Second Coming."

STANZA PATTERNS

14 Rhyming/Heroic Couplets. Read in MOP, "The Heroic Couplet" (pp. 121 ff.). In MOP, read Bradstreet, "The Author to Her Book" (123) & Browning, "My Last Duchess" (130, 135). Read Alexander Pope' Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress;" & Donne, "To His Mistress…"**
15 Courtney Zoffness reading. 8pm, Tillotson Room.
16 Couplets, cont. In MOP, read Owen, "Strange Meeting" (132); read Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" & poems by Derek Mahon** SUBMIT POEM IN COUPLETS.
21 No class.
23 Tercets. Read Dante excerpts** & In MOP, read Hardy, "Convergence of the Twain" (145), & in PBS, read Frost, "Acquainted with the Night" (171).
28 Tercets, cont. Read Derek Walcott, from Omeros; Elizabeth Bishop, "Pink Dog," Geoffrey Brock, "Move" & poems by B.H. Fairchild** SUBMIT POEM IN TERCETS OR TERZA RIMA.
30 Quatrains. In The MOP, read Blake, "The Tyger" (143); Dickinson (145 & 154). Read from
Tennyson's In Memoriam.**

October
1 Willard Spiegelman reading. 8pm, Quigley Auditorium.
5 Quatrains, cont. In MOP, read Stevie Smith, "Not Waving, But Drowning" (149); Muriel
Rukheyser, "Yes" (150). Read Roethke, "My Papa's Waltz"; Frost, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" and poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Tony Hoagland, and Geoffrey Brock. SUBMIT POEM IN QUATRAINS.

TRADITIONAL FORMS

7 PAPER ONE DUE. Ottava Rima. Read Byron, from Don Juan.**
12 No Class (Fall Break)
14 Blank Verse. In The Making of a Poem, "Blank Verse." Read Paradise Lost, from Book I.**
19 Read excerpts from Wordsworth's The Prelude.**
21 Read Frost's "Directive"(in MOP) and poems from Blank Verse packet** SUBMIT POEM IN BLANK VERSE.
David Baker reading. 8pm. Quigley Auditorium.

26 The Sonnet. 16th and 17th centuries. In The Making of a Poem, "The Sonnet" (55-72). In MOS, 363-380; 39-54; 77-78; . In PBS, read: Wyatt, "Whoso list to hunt…" (3); Spenser, Amoretti #18 (11) & 75 (16); Sidney, from Astrophel and Stella 1 (20) & 37 (22); John Davies of Hereford, "The Author Loving These…" (36); Shakespeare # 18, 27, 55, 60, 65, 116, 130 (40-50); Donne, Holy Sonnets 1, 5, 7, 10, 14 (59-62) ; Herbert, "Redemption"& "Prayer" (75); Milton, "When I consider how my light is spent" (81).
28 The Sonnet, the 18th & 19th centuries. Read "Introduction" to PBS. In MOS, read: 119-120; 131-133. In PBS, read: Wordsworth, "Nuns fret not…" (89), "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" (90), "The World is Too Much With Us" (90), "London, 1802" (92); Coleridge, "Work Without Hope" (96); Southey, "VI" (97); Shelley, "To Wordsworth" (102) & "Ozymandias" (103) & "Ode to the West Wind" (104); Keats, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer" (109) & "When I Have Fears…" (111) & "Sonnet to Sleep" (113); Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, XVIII & XLII (119).
Julie Otsuka reading. 8pm. Tillotson Room.

November

2 The Sonnet, the 19th & 20th centuries. Read Fussell, ch. 7. In PBS, read: Arnold, "West London" (129); Dante Rossetti, "Introductory Sonnet" (134); Christina Rossetti, "In an Artist's Studio" (137); Swinburne, "On the Russian Persecution…" (139); Hardy, "Hap" (139) & "Over the Coffin" (142) & "We Are Getting to the End" (143); Hopkins, "God's Grandeur" (144) & "Spring" (145); Yeats, "Leda and the Swan" & "Meru" (157). Robinson, "Cliff Klingenhagen" (160); Frost, "Mowing" (169) & "Acquainted with the Night" (171); McKay, "If We Must Die" (181); Millay, "I will put Chaos…" (190); Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (191) & "Dulce et Decorum Est" (192); Ransom, "Piazza Piece" (197).

4 20th c. Sonnets, cont. SUBMIT SONNET. In PBS, read: Lowell, "Words for Hart Crane" (230) & "Robert Frost" (231). In MOS, read: 179-182; 295-297; 339-342; Collins, "Sonnet" (73) & "American Sonnet" (332); Thomas, "When All…" (227); Drewster, "Death by Drowning" (239); Hecht, "Naming the Animals" (240); Kinnell, "Blackberry Eating" (248); Wright, "My Grandmother's Ghost" (249); Hacker, "Fourteen" (269), Matthews, "Cheap Seats…" (270); Alvarez, "from 33" (281);; Tennyson, "The Kraken" (310); Rilke, "Archaic Torso" (353); Vallejo, "Black Stone" (354); Sonnets by Geoffrey Brock.**
9 In Class Exam
11 The Villanelle. Read from Villanelle packet.**
16 The Villanelle, cont. SUBMIT VILLANELLE.
18 The Sestina. Read from Sestina packet.**
23 The Sestina, cont. SUBMIT SESTINA.
25 Thanksgiving

FREE VERSE
30 Free Verse. Read Fussell, ch. 5. Read Whitman, from "Song of Myself."**

December

2 Free Verse. Read Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."**
7 Free Verse. Read Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck" SUBMIT FREE VERSE POEM
9 Paper Two Due.

FINAL EXAM or FINAL PROJECTS DUE: Wednesday, December 16th, 9am.