Instructor: Nick Montfort, in@mkcinckm.com
Class meets in 56-162, Tuesdays 2pm–5pm
Office hours are in 14E-316 Wednesdays 9am–10am
And by appointment
For students experienced in writing poems. Regular reading of published contemporary poets and weekly submission of manuscripts for class review and criticism. Students expected to do a substantial amount of rewriting and revision. Classwork supplemented with individual conferences.
This class does not have required textbooks, although we will have required reading. We focus on student work. The readings we do (of other poems) will be selected, some of them during the semester, for their relevance to the goals, background, and ability level of advanced student poetry and at times of the particular group.
In a typical class meeting we’ll begin by closely reading and discussing student work that has been newly brought into the workshop on that particular day. The student whose work is being presented and discussed will listen as others have a chance to share their reactions and thoughts. We will read
20% - Preparation for and participation in class. This is a workshop class in which discussing your work and that of your fellow students is the core activity. The physical presence of your material being in the classroom is essential; you also have to have the items you need to participate, which will mainly be your own poems, ready to distribute to the group. Participation will also requires reciting memorized poems; giving short presentations about the historical, cultural, social, aspects of poetry along with concepts in form, metaphor, and meter; engaging in discussion; and doing writing (we undertake in-class writing exercises). Missing a class, with an unexcused absence, will reduce your overall grade by 10%, which will lower your final grade by one letter grade. Grade reduction for unexcused absences is not capped. If you miss four classes and your absences are unexcused, your grade will be reduced 40%. (Note: Absences for circumstances out of your control, such as health problems and family emergencies, are absolutely excused, as are absences for religious observance. You still will have to keep up in the course, so as soon as is practical, contact me and one or more other students to be able to keep up.) Presence and lack of participation (for instance, due to being unprepared) will result in a lesser grade reduction for each class. Last but not least, you are not allowed in enroll in 21W.771 if you are enrolled in another subject that meets at any overlapping time. Absences because you need to go to another class or an exam for another class are unexcused.
20% - Assigned work based on experiences out of class, which may include going to a poetry reading and writing a reflection about the experience or editing a poetry journal or other publication and writing a reflection of the experience.
60% - Quality of poems, and discussion of poetics, resulting from regular weekly participation in the workshop.
Any refinement of themes or assignments of specific poems will be filled in here.
Plagiarism—use of another's intellectual work without acknowledgement—is a serious offense. It is the policy of the CMS/W Faculty that students who plagiarize will receive an F in the subject, and that the instructor will forward the case to the Committee on Discipline. Full acknowledgement for all information obtained from sources outside the classroom must be clearly stated in all written work submitted. All ideas, arguments, and direct phrasings taken from someone else's work must be identified and properly footnoted. Quotations from other sources must be clearly marked as distinct from the student's own work. For further guidance on the proper forms of attribution, consult the style guides available in the Writing and Communication Center (E39-115) and the MIT Website on Plagiarism.
I used an experimental writing technique called appropriation when I directly ripped off the previous paragraph from another source and included it in this page, without quotation marks around it and without telling you where it came from, as if it were my own writing. For some reason it is considered perfectly ethical to do this on a syllabus at MIT. Be mindful that syllabus-writing and certain experimental writing practices, appropriate in a contemporary poetry context, may not be appropriate for scholarly writing and may not embody academic integrity in a traditional sense. As we will discuss this semester, this does not mean that experimental writers should operate without ethics or integrity. We won’t ignore the academic concept of plagiarism in this class; we will understand how appropriating text and, in certain cases, not explicitly stating one’s sources, is a method of conceptualist experimental writing that has a point to it.
The Writing and Communication Center offers free one-on-one professional advice from communication experts with advanced degrees and publishing experience. The WCC can help you further develop your oral communication skills and learn about all types of academic and professional writing. You can learn more about the WCC consultations at http://cmsw.mit.edu/writing-and-communication-center and register with the online scheduler to make appointments through https://mit.mywconline.com. Please note that appointments at the WCC tend to fill up quickly.
Information Systems & Technology (IS&T). As an enrolled MIT student you can access a variety of proprietary software at no cost, and, given my advocacy, use, and production of free software, I’ll discourage you from using such — use free/libre/open source software instead! IS&T also loans laptops to students: https://ist.mit.edu/loaner-equipment. If you have any technical questions about hardware, software, or anything IT-related, you can contact IS&T 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at: https://ist.mit.edu/help.
Laptop/Device Best Practices. You should have your computers/tablets/phones at the ready for when we (as a class) come up with a question that can be answered using cybernetic enhancement. We augment our intellect in various ways during our class sessions, using networked computation, using books, looking at a screen, listening to recordings, and so on. For the most part, we will be augmenting our intellect by discussing topics with each other, doing, sharing writing exercises (usually undertaken on paper), and otherwise attending to the people in the classroom community. This requires close attention to me and your fellow students, so keep your digital devices closed/face down until we determine that one or more of us will consult a resource. I may ask that we write together using a shared text editor; I'll provide some advance warning if this is planned.