Archive of Technique & Form Courses

This seminar will read a variety of longform poems published in the US (some in translation) in the last hundred years or so. Rather than proceeding chronologically or with comprehensive design, we’ll focus on particular texts, attending carefully to their poetics as well as to the sociohistorical contexts in which they emerged. What political and aesthetic imperatives inaugurate longform writing? And what shapes does it take? How might we—provisionally—taxonomize long poems, a term I use capaciously to include epics, verse plays, serial poems, sonnet sequences, and all manner of outliers? Some poets we’ll likely read include Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Celan, Myung Mi Kim, Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Notley, Sawako Nakayasu, George Oppen, Ed Roberson, and Raúl Zurita, among others. This course welcomes the writing of long poems and insightful prose commentary, both. Indeed, both may be required all semester long.

We’re going to talk about generating and managing emotion in the writing of fiction. Through readings across genres, as well as craft essays, we’ll look at techniques for approaching moments of strong emotion—a funeral, a breakup, a fight, a declaration of love—with an eye on point of view, prose style, characterization, worldbuilding, and tone. In my translation of the Poetics, Aristotle declares that plays should generate pity and fear in their audience. We’ll be asking what emotions we and the writers we read wish to generate, and we’ll be looking closely at what we find successful in an effort to expand our own skillsets. We’ll be asking how strongly those emotions are intended to be felt (a breakup in a sitcom is not the same as a breakup in a romance novel) and how the writers’ formal strategies affect the degree of emotional impact. We’ll also interrogate concepts like sentimentality and the novel of ideas as we attempt to find our own balance between the intellectual and emotional imperatives of making art.

IHow does one innovate from within—within being a relational ideation not to be confused with limiting—when considering the current pulses of writing? Within what? The page? Beyond the page? Story? Imagination? Form? Language/s? Syntax? Grammar? Breath? Other modalities of art? This workshop will look at innovation as a type of literary typography, but more importantly innovation as amalgamate threads to bend thinking, twist genre, reimagine rhetorical structures, and hover between the seams of possibility in prose/poetry/art. 

We will dissect and create to reinvent boundaries of the artist’s own illuminations around innovation in contemporary writing. We will consider Gloria Anzaldúa’s words, “It is not enough/ deciding to open” when considering our withins, and our focus will be to contemplate the ways we plunge our work into more risky and complex fabrications at the intersections of language and art.

Artists’ work in the course includes intensive reading/discussion of texts/authors who challenge and redefine the current writing landscape, an evolving manifesto on innovation, invention of a form, theoretical framework of the invented form, a sequence or set of writing that demonstrates the form, leading other artists in exploration of the form, workshop of reading-inspired art from the semester, and more.

This course will be an intensive study of the use of structure and technique in the writing of fiction. Students will do extensive reading of both fiction and analysis of fiction, examining published work with an eye to understanding its construction.Replace with your text

The form we’ll be exploring this semester is, simply put, THE SENTENCE. I see this as, on one hand, a deep dive into a particular history and aspect of the craft of writing, but on the other hand, a wide-ranging exploration of how many writers disrupt, manipulate, eschew, and innovate upon the sentence as both a structure and a concept – and why (and of course how) they do so. We’ll consider the sentence through the lens of rhetoric, translation, prose poetry, lyric fragment, experimental writing, and literary theory. The purpose is not per se to formulate a comprehensive theory of the sentence, but rather to use that lens to focus our artistic energies towards the further development of our own writing. The goal of this course is to take us down to a kind of brass-tacks, allowing us to approach even difficult texts from the point of view of subject, verb, verb object, punctuation, pronoun, ellipsis, preposition, conjunction – and omission of any or many of those things. We’ll operate at times on the level of the concept, at times the clause, and at times on the level of the word or comma itself. I hope we all leave the semester feeling more confidently mindful of our writerly choices, our own syntactical habits and patterns, as well as those of the artists we read. But I don’t want this to be merely forensic – I see THE SENTENCE as an entry point into a larger conversation about voice, meaning-making, style, and even self. I look forward to the semester and I hope we all have a great time.

This course on form and technique is intended to complement the novel workshop, and more generally to foster your development as reader and writer of the novel. Our focus will be on the craft, logic, and function of the chapter in short novels. We’ll think about what chapters are and what they do, how they represent the whole, how they constitute discrete dramatic units, how they correspond to time, place, subject, perspective, and/or character, and ultimately how they evince or reflect a broad narrative strategy. While I expect that our weekly conversations on craft will be wide-ranging and exploratory, I hope as we go that we will make connections and distinctions, that we’ll recognize and articulate various principles and strategies, and that the reading and talk will be of help to you as you contemplate the structure of your own longer projects. The course does not involve the transmission of a body of knowledge; it involves reading, discussion, and discovery within a community of engaged writers.

In this course, we will examine our own and others’ processes for finding sources for our fiction and moving from initial interest to developing idea to manuscript. We’ll look at methods for pursuing research and integrating the results of that research with character and story. We’ll talk about both autofiction itself and how to generate verisimilitude via the tools of autofiction. We’ll look at how writers work with and/or rewrite existing stories--myths, religious tales, the patterns of genre, other works of literature, historical/cultural narratives, etc. In addition to the assigned novels, we’ll also read/watch/listen to interviews and discussions of craft, running the gamut from practical how-to advice to philosophical musing, which is what I intend class discussion will do as well. 

This course engages the student in an advanced study of the genre of Literary Nonfiction with an emphasis on the wide range of subgenres in the field, as well as a close look at contemporary theory and practice and significant texts by innovative as well as more traditional literary nonfiction texts. Through lectures, class discussion, presentations, and critical and creative writing, we will work toward a thorough understanding of Literary Nonfiction in terms of its historical roots and literary traditions and consider the aesthetics of the genre, particularly with respect to questions of identity, sense of place, and connections between author, landscape, and history. We will also discuss character development (including first-person narrators) and working with details of setting and scene development.

In this “Technique and Form in Poetry” class, we’ll focus on prosody. In The Prosody Handbook: A Guide to Poetic Form (Dover, 2006), Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum refer to “a poet’s prosody” as the “control of the stream of sound,” calling it a “language within a language.” They go on to say, “To study prosody, then, is to study such things as tempo and sound, pause and flow, line and stanza, rhyme and rhymelessness.” I think of prosody as the music theory of poetry. We’ll explore the sources of meter, free verse, and prose in Anglophone poetry, the sonic choices poets have made and continue to experiment with, and the way syllables, words, phrases, sentences, lines, stanzas, and forms both traditional and invented make up a poem’s architecture.

This course will be an intensive study of the use of structure and technique in the writing of fiction. Students will do extensive reading of both fiction and analysis of fiction, examining published work with an eye to understanding its construction.

The theme of this seminar is “Sources for Poems: Translation, Ekphrasis, Erasure, and Other Transformations of Original Material.” We’ll read, discuss, and write our own poems that mine, respond to, converse with, an/or compose variations on existing texts and other works of art. The course will encompass imitation, translation, homage, research, ekphrasis, erasure, lists, word substitution, traditional and invented (or borrowed) forms, journal-keeping, daily writing, dreams and the unconscious, the use of prompts, literary “calls and responses,” and so on.

Very generally, this class is designed to investigate how a place, real or figurative, can serve as a generative or structural principle of a book of fiction.  I’m not that interested in the bland element of setting, nor do I care to focus on lush evocations of nature or gritty evocations of urban spaces or stirring evocations of the family estate.  You’ll most certainly never hear me talk about the land, or of the ennui of the suburbs, and I promise never to say that really, you know, it’s like the city (or town, house, neighborhood, pond, hotel, mall, backyard, etc.) is a central character of a novel.  I’m interested in a type of book, a type of approach to fiction, as well as in types of corresponding strategies of technique and structure and craft (point of view, voice, narrative stance, management of time, etc.)  The course is not about the transmission of a body of knowledge; it’s about reading within a community and exploring together the system of fiction—patterns, shapes, and interdependent elements, both micro and macro.  The process and skill of reading like a writer.  I have compiled fifteen books that have (in their very titles) an explicit focus on location.  There is nothing necessary or essential about these books; they are representatives of an approach.  While I expect that our discussion of a particular book each week will be broad, wide-ranging, and occasionally unfocused, I hope that as we move through the semester we will begin to see connections, common principles and strategies, between and among the books.  We will undoubtedly evaluate, but evaluation without explanation or analysis is not interesting or useful.This class will be an examination of the possibilities and challenges of writing in the third person. The reading will provide a historical overview of shifting approaches to and ideas about narration, consciousness, and realism. We’ll look at omniscient third with authorial intrusion, stream-of-consciousness, over-the-shoulder limited, third limited serial, free indirect style, third person plural, and we’ll examine the themes, techniques, characterizations, and worldviews associated with each point of view choice. The writing will ask students to experiment with narrative voice, narrative distance, interiority, and so on, via imitations of the writers we read.

Much has been written in recent years about the deep connections between writing and walking, movement and memory/imagination. This hybrid course will give us a chance to explore those links both in canonical literature and in our own creative practice. Virginia Woolf said she treasured walking because it provided a “space to spread my mind out in,” and I suspect that we can benefit, as writers and as readers, by pondering the interaction of interior and exterior landscapes that she alludes to. We’ll read a variety of works, fiction and nonfiction and criticism (with some attention to the boundaries between and among these categories), and we’ll also do (and share) some of our own writing/roving. Note: In the context of this course, “walk” should be construed metaphorically. The class does NOT require the physical ability to make long treks. In fact, we’ll be discussing myriad ways of moving through landscapes, and all angles of vision and modes of movement, physical and mental, are welcome.

We will concentrate on reading and writing sequences of poems that adhere to some formal principles or patterns.

This class will be an examination of the possibilities and challenges of writing in the third person. The reading will provide a historical overview of shifting approaches to and ideas about narration, consciousness, and realism. We’ll look at omniscient third with authorial intrusion, stream-of-consciousness, over-the-shoulder limited, third limited serial, free indirect style, third person plural, and we’ll examine the themes, techniques, characterizations, and worldviews associated with each point of view choice. The writing will ask students to experiment with narrative voice, narrative distance, interiority, and so on, via imitations of the writers we read.

This course is an advanced study of Literary Nonfiction with an emphasis on contemporary theory and practice.  We will focus closely on the work of Joan Didion, Sandra Cisneros, Terry Tempest Williams, and Simon Winchester.  Sandra Cisneros will be visiting our class and will give an evening reading (open to the public).  Through lectures, class discussion, presentations, and critical and creative writing, we will work toward a practical understanding of Literary Nonfiction in terms of its historical roots and literary traditions and consider the aesthetics of the genre, particularly with respect to questions of identity, sense of place, and connections between author, landscape, and history.  Students will be asked to consider voice, structure, style and subject matter of assigned texts with respect to how they make these types of decisions in their own creative work.

This course on hauntings is not quite a class on the classic ghost story.  Instead, this class aims to investigate haunting more generally as a dramatic device connected to memory, metaphor, time, vantage, character, obsession, guilt, suspense, and trauma.  Haunted fiction is fiction pointed backward, to the past, and I’m interested in thinking about how backward-turned fiction can move forward in a dramatically satisfying way.  I’m also interested in the ways that haunting—both literal and figurative—creates a drama of narration that is distinct from the drama of event.  I suspect that we’ll spend significant time thinking and talking about the connections between haunting, point of view, and form.  All of our novels are in first person, and thus their wildly various forms can all be seen as direct representations of the haunted mind, the (urgent) organization of memory, experience, and loss.  An author’s—or narrator’s—form is as revelatory, that is, as her style or her tone.  Readers can locate feeling and meaning in the large-scale shape and movement of the novel.  Ultimately, I see this as a class on the craft and complexity of first person point of view, with an emphasis on the forms and techniques of what we might call Haunted Narration.

The most immediately conspicuous element of the popular novel, and of many literary novels, tends to be plot, and some writers and literary taxonomists tend to divide the world of fiction neatly in two, into traditional “plot-driven” works and “experimental” (often a synonym for “dull” or “arty”) ones. This class will provide us an opportunity to explore the meanings and origins of the term plot (going all the way back to Aristotle), to distinguish it from story, and to read a variety of novels that employ it, or alternatives to it, in a variety of ways. By what other means might a reader be propelled through the pages of a book, come to care about its characters, etcetera? To what extent is plot necessary? Can novels not driven by traditional plots still provide an immersive experience, produce a satisfying story arc? Novelists to be read might include Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Joy Williams, Lucy Corin, Charles Portis, Muriel Spark, Padgett Powell, Sergei Dovlatov, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Beatty, Gaetan Soucy, Lorrie Moore, Tom Drury, Evan Connell, Yannick Murphy, Nicholson Baker, and others. We’ll also read some philosophical and theoretical work.

In this seminar, we’ll explore the interdependent relationship between world building and the construction of a narrative. What are the conventions, advantages, and challenges to various approaches to reality? We’ll read realism, magical realism, fantasy, detective fiction, alternative history, etc., and we’ll look at plot through the lens of those approaches. How does the invented world determine the story that’s necessary to explore it? How does a particular approach to story create a world? What are the similarities and differences in a quest plot, both in aim and execution, if it’s employed in a fantasy novel or a magical realist one?  How does mystery work in detective fiction versus realism versus alternative history? Our readings will include a number of different types of world-and-plot pairings.

We’ll focus on the sonnet and variations on the 14-line “norm,” proceeding historically but including a lot of contemporary work that “makes it new” while observing the traditional rules or breaking away, corrupting the form, and perhaps redefining it.  Phyllis Levin’s The Penguin Book of the Sonnet will be our guide, but we’ll supplement it with handouts and individual collections of sonnets by poets such as John Berryman, Marilyn Hacker, Karen Volkman, Moira Egan, David Wojahn, Rita Dove, and others.  We’ll consider sonnets that alter the number of lines, such as Hopkins’s curtal sonnets, John Hollander’s thirteeners, Norman Dubie’s 15-line Alehouse Sonnets, George Meredith’s 16-line Modern Love sonnets, and Gerald Stern’s American Sonnets.  In addition to reading and responding to many sonnets, we’ll be writing our own, of course, starting with exercises in strict form but moving on to individual, personal, perhaps contrary approaches that might (or might not) subvert or play around with meter and/or rhyme (if any), rhyme-scheme, structure, volta, and the number of lines.  We might find ourselves writing sequences, although that is certainly not required.  Each member of the class will also make a presentation of sonnets by a poet whose work we have not had time to read or consider in depth.

The focus of Forms of Poetry this term will be on going beyond individual poems to longer works: sequences, long poems, unified sections of books. How is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? What new discoveries and potential problems arise when poets go long? We will discuss ways different poets engage the challenge of longer structures, exploring their writing processes and varieties of published work. The course is open to graduate poets in their first term of the program and beyond and may be taken concurrently with the graduate poetry workshop. Poets to be discussed include Theodore Roethke, Rita Dove, Louise Glück and at least one poet who will be visiting this term.

In our exploration of poetic forms, we’ll read a lot of poems (some in foreign languages, with Stanley Burnshaw’s The Poem Itself as our guide) and some essays on prosody (such as Robert Graves’s “Harp, Anvil, Oar”). We’ll write a lot of exercises in various kinds of meter, traditional forms, invented stanzas, and free verse. We’ll begin with an intensive crash course in iambic pentameter and other means of measuring verse (such as syllabics and Anglo-Saxon strong-stress meter). We’ll consider the implications and applications of Ezra Pound’s point that “there is a ‘fluid’ as well as a ‘solid’ content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase.” The culmination of the course will be individual Projects in Form, for which students will put together at least ten pages of poems that are unified by some principles of form and will write essays reflecting on those principles and precedents.

The concept of time is so fundamental to narrative, so inextricably bound to drama and meaning and character, that most novels, whatever else they might be about, are about time. For the working writer, however, time most often represents not a thematic or metaphysical concern but a set of structural and technical problems that must be solved. This seminar is intended to be a practical examination of the dramatic implications of the writer’s temporal choices. We will read a short novel each week, paying particular attention to scope, chronology, structure, pacing, tension, backstory, forecasting, the dramatic clock, the ratio of scene and summary, and transitions, as well as the relationship of time to other elements of fiction such as point of view, character, conflict, mood, and setting. The reading list will likely be organized from short time span to long time span, and will include work by Paula Fox, Toni Morrison, Thomas Bernhard, Alice McDermott, Saul Bellow, Dorothy Baker, Denis Johnson, Christine Schutt, and others.

This semester we’ll make an unconventional, but I hope intriguing, exploration of contemporary American fiction and of what aesthetic judgments are, how they arise, and the role they play in the so-called “marketplace of ideas.” Critical readings will include everything from Kant and Hume to more contemporary critics, whether theoretical or practical; these will range from Adorno to D. G. Myers and Meg Wolitzer. The primary form our investigation will take is twofold: Over the first 2/3 of the term, we’ll conduct a Tournament of Books, designed along the lines of the one run annually by the Daily News. We’ll start with sixteen American novels of 2011, and we’ll assign judges and commentators and pit them against each other in a kind of competition (or combination of competition, parody of competition, and meta-commentary on the wisdom and the politics of putting books into “competition”). At the end of this exercise we’ll not only have named a winner but, far more important, will have learned a lot not only about the landscape of new American fiction (its diversity of form and tone and milieu and origin; the variety of tools and techniques and forms available to it) but also about the underpinnings and assumptions of our qualitative judgments about books and other art forms, and about our responsibilities and our aims in making such judgments. The second part of the course will consist of revisiting, fifty years later, the judging of the 1963 National Book Award. The class will sift through contenders, name three finalists, read them, choose a “winner” . . . and then reflect on the exercise, on the notion of “posterity” and of “enduring literary value,” on the politics and accidents/incoherences of prize committees, and so on. The course will also provide ample opportunity for students to learn about writing in lively, accessible, engaged ways about contemporary fiction. When we’re discussing the novels themselves, our conversations will focus on matters of form and technique, on how fiction achieves (or doesn’t achieve) certain effects and on how and why we judge those effects in the way we do. What do we mean when we say, in workshop or elsewhere, that a book or a scene or a character “succeeds”? We’ll be aiming for a balance between readerly and writerly approaches. (Everyone will be required to read and write, whether briefly or at length, about approximately 10-12 books of fiction during the term.)