Assignment #1

GO GET BOOKS.

READ:

1. handout
2. from PAM--Ginsberg 130-143 and 635-7, Berssenbrugge 517-524
3. Walt Whitman's 1891 version of "Song of Myself" from Leaves of Grass, sections 1-6 (find here: http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/log_026.html)
4. your partner's psalm or in-class exercise--GLOSS and MAKE LINE EDITS

WRITE:

(The following assignment--or the revision of the in-class assignment--is to be sent to your writing partner/s' email/s no later than Tuesday the 20th.)

The psalm is a form with religious and prophetic resonances. The long line seems to test the limits of breath. The form is able to incorporate shorter units of thought (by using punctuation within the line) and longer, more complex syntactical structures that give it sometimes the feeling of accretion (meaning building through lists of evidence) and sometimes a meandering, rambling, even unstable sense of its own construction. Does this line approach a point of ranting? And if it does: are not the mad part prophet?

After reading through the handouts given to you as well as the Whitman, Ginsberg, and Berssenbrugge, write a 25+ line poem incorporating some or all the strategies of the psalm form: its long lines, its anaphora (repeated beginning words or phrases), its rolling, wave-like loose rhythm, its incorporation of lists, its penchant for holding content that is mythic. Even Smart’s cat becomes a totemic creature in this form.

Be big. This form should empower you to speak of and to the world in sweeping gestures. Step outside your smallness and become Whitmanesque. Do not fear making grandiose statements of what the world is, should, or could be—-they are part and heart of this tradition.

As Dear Uncle Walt said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Psalm on.

TURN-IN on FRIDAY the 23rd:

1. EVERYONE-- 2 copies of the gloss/es (one to your partner/s, one to me)

2. GROUP A --shd bring enough copies of a poem (in-class intro or psalm) for the whole class to be workshopped on the 23rd.

2. GROUP B --shd bring enough copies of a poem (in-class intro or psalm) for the whole class to be workshopped on the 30th.