Creative Writing: Poetry - UCLA Extension

Syllabus

Note to students: While this syllabus is posted to give you an overview of the
course, it is subject to change. If you have any questions or concerns, please

contact the Writers’ Program at (310) 825-9415 or via email at
[email protected].

Creative Writing: Poetry

Instructor: Rick Bursky

Course Description

Available for UCLA transferable credit, this workshop combines writing assignments
with an exploration of contemporary poetry. Students look at forms ranging from the
sonnet to prose poems, and develop their own voice. Each week the work of a
contemporary poet is discussed and writing assignments are critiqued. Though the
schedule for workshopping poems will be determined at the first class when we
know exactly how many students there will be. If the class is full we won’t be able to
workshop each poem each week so we’ll have a signup sheet for that. The course
goal is for students to finish with a number of polished and completed poems and
understand the demands and rewards of living an inspired life through poetry.

Required Text

A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
edited by Stuart Friebert, David Walker and David Young
Oberlin College Press 1997
ISBN: 0-932440-77-0

Grading

Grades will be based on attendance, class participation, reading assignments,
having a new poem ready to workshop each week, and a final portfolio of revised
poems.

Week One

Introduction. Instructor’s background. Students introduce themselves.

This class will be broken in two parts. For the first half of each class we will look at
some craft aspect or group of poets in contemporary poetry. In the remaining half we
will workshop students’ poems. Each week students will bring in one poem with
copies for everyone in the class. Workshop participation, both as writer and critic, is
essential to the success of this class.

A few gems:

Creative Writing: Poetry page 1

You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. Forget inspiration. Being a writer/poet is
a decision. You decide then you do the work.
__________________________________

Some things to talk about:
Line
The unit of composition is a line, not the sentence. Of course, the prose
poem is the exception.

Forms & not (one of each)
Sonnet, Ghazal, Sestina, Prose Poem, Free Verse, Blank Verse, Create
your own form!

Types of poems
confessional (don’t confuse poetry with therapy)
language (against the law)
narrative
epic
lyric
imagism
surrealism
duende

What is a poem?
Fiction is the art of the story, poetry is the art of language.
“Narrative is like an almond in a chocolate bar, nice but not
necessary.” Charles Wright.

If not narrative what? Imagery
While each poem creates its own universe, the images in that universe
cannot be arbitrary, they must exist in language suited to the narrative.

Reading assignment:
Essay “Images and Images” Charles Simic
page 95 A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Essay “Notes on the Image: Body and Soul” Donald Hall
page 98 A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Quote for the Week:
“Poetic language … can be defined first as language in which the sound of the words
is raised to an importance equal to that of their meaning, and also equal to the
importance of grammar and syntax.” Kenneth Koch

Creative Writing: Poetry page 2

Week Two

Discussion on images. Read the Russell Edson essay on images in
class. Handout the James Wright poem and talk about how images
point to each other.

As I Step over a Puddle at the End
of Winter, I Think of an
Ancient Chinese Governor

And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?

Written A.D. 819

Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What’s the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Towards some political job or other
In the city of Chungchou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.

But it is 1960, it is almost spring again.
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.
Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?

Reading assignment:
David Young essay “Second Honeymoon: Some Thoughts on Translation”
page 198 A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Quote for the Week:
“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.” Charles Simic

Creative Writing: Poetry page 3

Week Three

Read and hand out Yusef Komunyakaa, Denise Duhamel, Wyslawa Szymborska

Review students poems.
Reading assignment:
Sandra McPherson essay “The Working Line”
page 75 A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Charles Simic essay “Some Thoughts About the Line”
page 93 A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Quote for the Week:
“Poetry is language in orbit.” Seamus Heaney

Week Four

The Energy of the Line: The Line Break
The unit of composition is a line, not the sentence.
Talk about The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach.

Use Mark Strand’s poem “The Idea” to discuss line breaks.

The Idea
for Nolan Miller

For us, too, there was a wish to possess
Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,
Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless
In which we might see ourselves; and this desire
Came always in passing, in waning light, and in such cold
That ice on the valley’s lakes cracked and rolled,
And blowing snow covered what earth we saw,
And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again,
Looked not as they had, but ghostly and white
Among false curves and hidden erasures;
And never once did we feel we were close
Until the night wind said, “Why do this,
Especially now?” Go back to the place you belong;
And there appeared, with its windows glowing, small,
In the distance, in the frozen reaches, a cabin;
And we stood before it, amazed at it being there,
And would have gone forward and opened the door,
And stepped into the glow and warmed ourselves there,
But that it was ours by not being ours,

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And should remain empty. That was the idea.

Review students poems.
Reading assignment:
Dennis Schmitz essay Gorky Street: Syntax and Context
page 58 A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Hand out Stephen Dobyns essay “Ritsos and the Metaphysical Moment” (from his
book Best Words, Best Order

Quote for the Week:
“Poetry is philosophy’s sister, the one that wears makeup.” Jennifer Grotz

Week Five

Read and hand out Dean Young, Yannis Ritsos, Louise Gluck

Review students poems.

Quote for the Week:
“A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.” Naomi Shihab Nye

Week Six

Discuss stanza: Organizing the Poem
Handout Charles Simic’s poem “I Climbed a Tree to Make Sure” as an example of
organization.

I Climbed a Tree to Make Sure

A working slaughterhouse prettied up
By the evening sunlight
Is what I think of your meadows and hills,
Mrs. Simic.

What about the woods in the back
Where your cats vanish
And one hears short, bloodcurdling
Shrieks at night – or worse!
One hears nothing
But the wind gusting in the dry leaves –
Like a baby rattle

Creative Writing: Poetry page 5

Shaken by an undertaker?

Every butcher needs an assistant,
The sun skewered in a tree told me.
By now I could smell your chimney smoke
And before long there you were,
Stirring the heavy pot on the stove,
Turning around to wink at me.

Review students poems.
Reading assignment:
Denise Levertov essay, “Work and Inspiration.”
page 58 A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Quote for the Week:
“Poetry’s greatest task is … to foster a necessary privacy in which the imagination
can flourish.” Dean Young

Week Seven

Look at the poetry of Error! Reference source not found. and Mark Strand. Play
the Kasischke lecture What To Do While Waiting For The Muse.

Review students poems.
Reading assignment:
Hand out the Lorca essay, Play and the Theory of Duende.

Quote for the Week:
“A good poet is an amateur who behaves like a professional.” Paul Hyland

Week Eight

Discuss Duende. Hand out Sylvia Plath poem “Daddy” and discuss duende.

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
for thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breath or Achoo.

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Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time –
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common,
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root.
I could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you,
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true,
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

Creative Writing: Poetry page 7

I’ve always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygook.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You –

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root.
The voices just can’t worm through,

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two –
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

Creative Writing: Poetry page 8

And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Review students poems.
Reading assignment:
Russell Edson essay “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or
Notions on the Care and Feeding of the Prose Poem”
page 58 A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Hand out Stephen Dobyns essay “Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory”
(from his book Best Words, Best Order

Quote for the Week:
“The best poetry opens a window in the reader’s heart and mind. It’s memorable,
hummable.” Maura Dooley

Week Nine

Metaphor. What is the poem really talking about?
Nin Andrews’ “Confessions of an Orgasm” Handout and discuss the poem’s
metaphors.

Confessions of an Orgasm

When I was merely a slip of a thing, Mother taught me the that
orgasms can’t tolerate humans, the scent of sweat mingling with
perfume, the sound of haunting moans. When the time comes for you
to enter a body, resist for all you’re worth. Like the pilot of a plane
circling over a city, looking down at the lights, remain airborne as
long as possible, checking out the small lives below. When at last
you touch ground, stay for an instant before taking to the air again,
laugh as the pathetic people rush for their doors and cry out like
abandoned children. No passengers are ever allowed on board.

Me, I love the pungent humans. I cannot resist their call. Like snow in
winter, I fall helplessly, slowly, before dissolving into a river at the
moment of contact. The loss of myself is always unbearable.

Quote for the Week:
“A poem begins as list of things one might otherwise have forgotten; it ends as
origami.” Finuala Dowling

Creative Writing: Poetry page 9

Week Ten

Read and hand out Mary Young, David Young, Ed Hirsch

Review students poems.

Quote for the Week:
“The novel relates; the poem tries to leave as much unsaid as possible.” Charles
Simic

Week Eleven

Students will reserve a time slot and we’ll individually for 15 minutes in private to
discuss their poems.

Quote for the Week:
“Poetry is something that takes place after prose has been exhausted.” Billy Collins

Week Twelve

Introduce students to literary journals.
American Poetry Review
Field
Gettysburg Review
Georgia Review
Black Warrior Review
Paris Review
Verse
Mid-American Review

Some words on getting published and preparing poems to send to literary journals.
Students get up in front of class and do a reading of their poems.

Quote for the Week:
“There’s no preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume
of poetry or a book of philosophy in one’s pocket would serve as well as any
university.” Charles Simic

Creative Writing: Poetry page 10

Good advice in a cool poem:

Berryman
by W.S. Merwin

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion

Creative Writing: Poetry page 11

passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

Creative Writing: Poetry page 12