The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies

 HAULING UP THE MORNING: Survey of Witness Poetry

(Class Day/Time)

Michelle Meyering

Office Hours:

(Day/Time) and by appointment

mmeyering@gmail.com

909.810.7693

 

Course Description:

 

This course will ask, first and foremost, what is a witness poem?  By answering this question, we will open a larger discussion on the contemporary value of poetry.  In an age marked by war, witness poetry, is particularly important, as the pop-genre is specifically focused on poets who have witnessed atrocity and the significance of their work.   

I’ve always liked how American poet, Robert Frost, said that a poem was “a momentary stay against confusion.”  In part, a witness poem is this, the unraveling of certain events.  That is to say, for the witness poet, a poem is as much an attempt to understand what he sees, as it is a declared confidence in the way in which he sees it.  By writing poems, we poets right our world.  We recognize that only we will see the world, this way.  We re-affirm our self.  Poems also, like little windows, allow us to have a look at how other people live.  Not just on celebration days, not just in fine clothes, but a person’s life: dull, laundry pinning, LIFE.  This breed of understanding is the underpinning of empathy, the cornerstone of the healing process.

As a class we will determine how witness poetry has historically functioned in the face of conflict and ask—How will it function in the future?  Considering that nations, communities, and families cannot be rebuilt until the psychological needs of individual citizens have been met—Can poetry, emphasizing personal voice and the act of creation, act as valuable tool in this process?

 

Although we will, for the most part, move in chronological order, this course is not just a historical survey. Together we will discuss the prosody, subject matter, influences, and techniques, born of English and American traditions, which affect this subgenre. Hauling Up The Morning is designed to be an introduction to witness poetry. This course is less theoretical, therefore, than it is experiential.  As we are each witnesses in and of the world, you will learn by attempting to write poems in various forms, by responding to poems (and poets) in papers and letters, and by vocalizing your findings through participation.

 

 

Assigned Readings Include:

 

A Poetry Handbook.  Mary Oliver, Harcourt Brace.

Against Forgetting. Carolyn Forché, ed. Norton.

Machete Season. Jean Hatzfeld, Picador.

That The World May Know. James Dawes, Harvard. Selected chapters to be handed out.

Additional works will be handed out during the semester.

 

 

 

Recommended Readings Include:

The following texts will be on reserve in the library for the duration of the course.

 

The Country Between Us.  Carolyn Forché, Harper Collins.

I Explain A Few Things. Pablo Neruda, FSG.

35 Poems. Roque Dalton, Azul Editions.

 

Requirements:

 

Essays             You will write 2 explication essays in this course.  Guidelines for each essay will be distributed on the date they are assigned.  I encourage all students to visit during office hours.  In an office meeting, I will be happy to discuss the weaknesses and strengths of your draft. If I see the paper before it’s turned in, I will tell you what grade it would receive at that level of the drafting process.  I will also give notes to guide your next draft.  Writing tutorials are available on campus for students who would like extra attention.

 

Journal.              You will be keeping a journal for this class.  Each Monday a short assignment announced.  Journals will be collected on Wednesdays. Please date and create a “title” for each entry, as missed entries will count against your final evaluation.  The journal should not be looked at as busy work, or a burden, but as a discovery space.  Reading responses, short assignments, and in class writing exercises will be collected in your journals. 

 

participation            You are expected, each class session, to participate actively in discussions and class activities.  The readings I’ve chosen are vital to our class discussions and journal responses.  Reading assignments are specified in the course schedule. I’m very aware that the load is heavy.  Please make the time to finish each of them.  If any change is to be made to the assignment schedule, it will be announced in class.  Remember, your thoughtful participation in class discussion will constitute a major portion of your final grade.

 

Poems            There will be poems due occasionally, none of which are to be graded. As with the reading journal entries (see above), I will count your completion of these assignments toward your final evaluation.  Poetry assignments will be inspired by reading and class conversation.  We will work with your poems in class and so, poems must be turned in on the day they are due. I cannot accept late poems but am happy to look at them, returning them unmarked.

 

Final Project:

Class anthology

At the start of the semester, the class will begin cataloguing conflicts that have taken place internationally since 1991, the year Forché’s anthology leaves off.  This catalogue can (and should) include domestic concern (i.e.: poverty, prostitution in the US).  Students will be assigned to a “conflict” midway through the semester.  Students will collect witness poems connected to their assigned subject.  Students will also provide a typed introduction to their section, which will include historical information and their poet’s biography (ala Against Forgetting). Sections will be gathered and bound prior to the “Final” where the class anthology will be distributed and presented on.  

 

Your evaluation will be based upon:

·      Critical papers 1-2

·      Journal

·      Assigned Poems

·      Participation

·      Final Project                                               

 

Absences and Late Work

 

Your presence in the class, is this class. Therefore, no absence is “excused”.  There will be a small number of exceptions made for pre-approved circumstances or emergencies.  Two absences will affect your final grade. Three absences will result in your automatic failure of the course.

 

All assignments are due at the beginning of our class period on the date specified on our class assignment schedule.  If you will be absent on a day that an assignment is due, please arrange to drop your assignment off before the class you will be missing.

 

 

Class Meetings & Assignments:

 

DATE             Course introduction. Why does poetry persist? Poetry like bread.  Nazim Hikmet, “Thing I Never Knew I Loved,” Miklos Radnoti, “Letter to My Wife,” Against Forgetting (AF) pp.369-370.  Introduce Final Project, begin the “conflict catalog”.

 

DATE            A Poetry Handbook (APH): 1-18; Against Forgetting (AF): 29-47; WWI. Selections from All Quiet on the Western Front(distributed in class.)  The importance of tension in subject matter: Love, Death, War, Childhood.

 

DATE             AF: Georg Trakl, “A Romance to Night,” “Downfall,” “In the East,” “Grodek,” pp. 79-81. Georg Trakl and imagism. James Wright’s homage to Trakl (distributed in class.) A poem in Trakl’s voice assigned: only images.  Continue discussion of WWI. The demise of duty.

 

DATE             Essay #1 assigned. Poem due (typewritten), in the style of Trakl’s imagism.  Discussion/reaction to poems.APH: pp. 19-24; 35-50. AF: Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Siegried Sassoon, “Repression of War Experience,” pp.78-79; Blues, Jazz, and Gospel. Hip-hop as poetry. 

 

DATE            Continue discussion Hip-hop.  Rap War: NWA, Westside Connection, Public Enemy v. Nas, BIG, J and the birth of SLAM.  The jazz of poetry: the birth of free verse and surrealism. Does witness have to follow reason?  AF: Apollonaire, “The Little Car,” pp 68-70;  cummings, “(i sing of Olaf glad and big)” pp 85-86; Breton, “War,” pp 92-93.

 

DATE:            AF: Anna Akhmatova, “Instead of a Preface,” pp. 101-102. APH: “Verse that is Free,” pp. 67-75. Discussion of Williams and Whitman selections in Oliver’s chapter. In-class writing. Invoking a time and place without symbols, written to someone passed who shared that time and place (poem two assigned).

 

DATE:             Continue discussion of free verse. APH: “Turning the Line,” pp. 54-57. Enjambment to compound the levels of meaning. James Wright, “A Blessing” (distributed in class.) The questioning spirit of the arts since the Renaissance. The exile of the individual from “the mind of God.”

 

DATE            Poem due in the voice of Akhmatova. Discussion of the assignment and its benefits/frustrations.  Why are death and war befitting of poetry? Why bring this into the world? Selections from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and That The World May Know (distributed in class). Can you tell a “true” war story? Pointers for Writing Essay #1.

 

DATE             The origins of the poetic act. Bly’s three levels of composition. The six aspects of the so-called “great” poem. The Spanish Civil War. AF: Miguel Hernandez, “Lullaby to an Onion,” pp. 170-172; Lorca, “Little Infinite Poem,” pp 153-154. What is Duende? What is Deep Song?

 

DATE            Essay #1 due.  APH: “Images,” pp. 92-108. A poem that becomes the object it is describing. Eliot: the objective correlative. The Vedic principle: “I am that power.”  Keats and “To Autumn.” Non-dualism and the arts. Poetry as “life on life’s terms.” Love as a means of tension.

 

DATE             The Poetry of World War II. AF: Max Jacob, pp. 182-183; Brecht, “The God of War,” p. 212; “When Evil Comes…” pp. 212-213. Symbolism and its connection to the Cubist movement. (Jacob and Picasso in Paris.) What is the effect of the prose poem? How is it different from a lineated poem? From free verse? From traditional verse? 

 

DATE             Poem due in the voice of Hernandez. Discussion of the assignment and its benefits/frustrations. The American Response. Childhood and poetry. Selections from Gluck (“Among School Children”), Kunitz (“Halley’s Comet”), distributed in class.

 

DATE             Writing the War as a Childhood. AF: Charles Simic, “Butcher Shop,” p. 350, “The Lesson,” pp. 350-352; “Prodigy,” pp. 353-354. Selections from essays by Simic. (Distributed in class.)   Assignments made from the conflict catalog, for the final project, in class. 

 

MIDDLE OF SEMESTER  

 

DATE             The Holocaust. Images from Shoah. AF: Paul Celan, “Night Ray,” p. 380; “Death Fugue,” pp. 380-382; “THERE WAS EARTH,” p. 382. The poem as cathedral.

 

DATE             Essay #2 Assigned. Stories from Auschwitz. AF: Borowski, “The Sun of Auschwitz,” pp 383-384; Pagis, “Written in Pencil,” p. 387; Further discussions of form and effect. The orator and the whisperer: comparisons of Whitman and Dickinson.

 

DATE             The Cold War. AF: Milosz, “A Task,” p. 438; “On Angels,” pp. 442-443; Szymborska, “Children of an Epoch,” pp. 457-458; “Once we knew the world well,” p. 460. Levine and the political/spiritual (to be distributed in class.) The poet’s acceptance of complicity. In-class writing: a poem in the voice of Milosz, in which you accept blame for a small part of something that, largely, was out of your power. Revisiting Bly’s idea of adult grief. Milosz’s idea that we must see the distant and the particular in the poem.

 

DATE             Milosz Poem Due. The Vietnam War. “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful no matter what.” Selections from Bruce Weigl’s Song of Napalm (distributed in class). Further thoughts on the power of admitting our complicity. Poetry as forgiveness. AF: “Burning Shit at An Khe,” pp. 703-704; “The Last Lie”.  Discuss Final Project.

 

DATE            The Civil Rights Movement in America. AF: Etheridge Knight, “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane,” pp. 684-685. Richard Wright, “I Have Seen Black Hands,” pp. 631-633. Prison poetry. Whitman’s influence; Wright’s Departure from Whitman. Influences of gospel and hope in the poetics. Reading poetry aloud. In class writing: An “I have seen” poem, long lines in the style of Wright.  

 

DATE             Conflict in Latin America. 35 Poems, Roque Dalton. AF: Neruda, “The Dictators,” p. 574; “America, I Do Not Call Your Name Without Hope,” p. 574, Selections from I Explain A Few Things; Forche, The Country Between Us, (CBU) “The Colonel,” p. 16; “San Onofre…,” p. 9.  Introduction to translation.

 

DATE             Neruda translation due. Discussion of the assignment and its benefits/frustrations. Forche, continued. CBU: “Because One is Always Forgotten,” p. 23; “Expatriate,” pp. 29-30; “Letter from Prague,” pp. 31-32; “Photograph of My Room,” pp.34-36. Are we able to bear witness to that which we have not personally experienced? Stories contained in descriptions of objects.

 

DATE            Genocide.  Rwanda and Darfur. Machete Season, Jean Hatzfeld.  What does Hatzfeld accomplish, turning our lens towards the hunters, rather then the hunted?  Essay #2 Assigned.   

 

DATE             Check-In Day: Final projects due.  Questions and concerns addressed (regarding final project and Essay #2). 

 

DATE             Witness poets of Iraq.  September 11.  In class writing assignment: TBA.  What difference will poetry of witness make in the conflict we find ourselves in currently?   Final project sections due.

 

DATE             Essay #2 Due.  A roundtable sharing of insights. Overall thoughts on poetry composed and read this semester. Discussion of your generation’s poetry of witness.  What good has poetry/will poetry have done?

 

FINAL              Anthologies distributed.  Brief presentations made on each “section”. 

 

 

**NOTE: Cultural events that pertain to the course taking place within 60 miles of the University will be added to the syllabus prior to distribution**