Jose Moctezuma

In Stanzas in Meditation, Gertrude Stein writes, ¿I call carelessly that the door is open / Which if they can refuse to open / No one can rush to close.¿ Playing on the Latin root of stanza as a standing space or room, Stein writes her stanzas as rooms, spaces, and boundary zones that are equally porous and enclosed. Is the stanza a coordination of limits and encasements, or is it a liminal space of experimentation and transgression? Does the stanza bear a similar relation to the body of a poem as a paragraph does to the flow of a narrative or argument? In this course, we will be writing, workshopping, and thinking in and through the stanza as a unit of form and function within poetic composition and lyric prose. We¿ll also engage with prose poetry and lyric prose in which the paragraph functions as a destabilizing or deterritorializing event in narrative form. We¿ll read classic and contemporary theories about the stanza, as well as read across various stanzaic forms, ranging from classical standards drawn from Sappho, Spenser, and Swinburne, as well contemporary experiments in the stanza and the prose poem by poets like Lyn Hejinian, Jericho Brown, Juan Felipe Herrera, Anne Waldman, and Nathaniel Mackey. Course work will consist of weekly creative writing assignments, revision exercises, in-class review sessions, a brief two-page research statement, and a final portfolio of work.

In this course students will create a singular written project and enrich their understanding of how that project fits into a larger tradition. Through full-class workshops, small-group critiques, individual conferences, and engaged revision, students will deepen the grooves of their writing process and cultivate a practice that is open to feedback and that lets in surprise. Students' thesis projects can take multiple forms: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, comics, drama, hypertext, performance, hybrid work, or a combination thereof. The course's readings and inquiries will be driven both by students' own studies into material significant to their writing and by their productive engagement with their classmates' work. By the end of the semester, students will have completed a BFAW thesis, consisting of three parts: (1) a creative project; (2) an annotated bibliography; and (3) a reflective essay, which will examine an issue of craft, subject, process, or genre.

In the third chapter of his landmark novel, Ulysses, James Joyce defines the 'ineluctable modality of the visible' as a form of 'thought through the eyes,' a sensory technique that transcribes the 'seen' into forms of knowledge and scenography. What does it mean to (strictly, only) write what one sees? What does 'thought through the eyes' look like, sound like, read like? In this course, we¿ll be playing with this concept by extending it into other realms of writing beyond just fiction: poetry, creative nonfiction, and screenwriting. More significantly, we'll be studying the intersections between cinema and writing that could provide avenues for exploration and experimentation in different visual-textual modalities. We will read work by authors like Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Bernadette Mayer, Nathalie Leger, Susan Howe, Danielle Colobert, and Lisa Robertson; and we'll analyze the work of filmmakers like Jean Cocteau, Sergei Parajanov, Marguerite Duras, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Barbara Loden, and Jim Jarmusch. Course work will consist of weekly creative writing assignments, revision exercises, in-class review sessions, a research statement, and a final portfolio of work.

A seminar in which we'll be thinking about surface-depth and foreground-background relations in our writing practices; also, we'll read across material poetries, book-objects, and visual poetry. As a supplement, we'll also engage in a history of close reading practices that moves from close-reading, to distant-reading, to surface-reading, each of which covers a specific methodology of reading and critical thinking (so, the New Critics to Helen Vendler, to Franco Moretti, to Best and Marcus), while also providing a way of reading/revising one's own work in a critical mode.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.