Myself and Strangers.

CONCEPT

Poetry Literature Seminar Fall 2006
Instructor: Mark Bibbins
Myself and Strangers
CRN#1668

This course deals with representations of the self in contemporary poetry, and some of the ways in which authors and their audiences choose to negotiate accountability, identity, honesty, embellishment, polyvocality, gender, experimentation, love, gossip, influence, accuracy, drugs, the lyric, authority, mental illness, genre, style, homage, race, innuendo, labeling, irreverence, independence, fakery, obsession, turf wars, sexuality, political correctness, horniness, objectivity, ellipticism, taste, politics, trust, daring, etc.

Reading List
E.E. Cummings, 1x1
Alice B. Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (introduction by M.F.K. Fisher)
Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems
Fernando Pessoa, (Richard Zenith, trans.) Fernando Pessoa & Co.
Lucie Brock-Broido, The Master Letters
Anne Carson, Plainwater
Lyn Hejinian, The Fatalist
Diana Vreeland, DV
Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary
Michael Palmer, Sun
Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Rosmarie Waldrop, Reluctant Gravities
Ron Palmer, Logicalogics

Class discussions will coincide with or be interrupted by songs, slides, videos, and recipes. Also under consideration will be Gertrude Stein* (“Lifting Belly”), Hart Crane (“Voyages”), Björk, Cindy Sherman, Throwing Muses, John Berryman, Amy Cutler, Tricky, Hannah Weiner, Lee Bontecou, Jeff Buckley, Larry Rivers, Joe Le Sueur, JT Leroy, Grace Hartigan, and Emily Dickinson. Additional handouts—essays, poems, reviews, articles, etc.— concerning these figures and others will be provided by the instructor.

*Familiarity with Everybody’s Autobiography and/or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a class prerequisite.

Mark Bibbins received a Lambda Literary Award for his first collection of poems, Sky Lounge (Graywolf Press, 2003). He co-founded LIT, the journal of the New School graduate writing program. He is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Boston Review, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry 2004.

---

First class, tonight.

END OF POST.