Instructor: Nick Montfort, in@mkcinckm.com
Class meets in 56-162, Tuesdays 2pm–5pm
Regular office hours / open studio by Zoom (URL provided in class) 9:30am–10:30am Thursdays
No regular office hours during spring break or April 10
In-person office hours 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 very short presentations 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 those 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, and exams or other academic activities related to other classes do not take precedence over our class meetings. Absences because you need to go to another class or an exam for another class are unexcused.
20% - A report based on experiences out of class, which may include going to a poetry reading, starting/editing a poetry publication, or going to an art exhibit or concert with a significant poetic aspect.
10% - An in-class oral report (from the front of the classroom, without slides) about a book of poetry that one of our OPPs (Other Poet’s Poems) comes from.
50% - Quality of your poems, and your discussion of your own poetics, resulting from regular weekly participation in the workshop.
We will workshop a number of student poems each day. Students assigned to bring in poems the week before will each bring printed copies of their poem, one copy for each class participant (n+1 where n = number of students, because we also have an instructor participating). ¶ Each day we will have at least one OPP (Other Poet’s Poem) to study. We have an OPP during our first class meeting; on other days, students are will read the OPP beforehand and one student will read the book in which the poem appears and report on that book. Our OPPs will not be restricted to the poetry of any particular nation, they will just be (more or less) in English. ¶ During the semester, I may add information to specific class days.
Although there are themes that serve to focus our discussion each class, we will inevitably deal with many aspects of poetry every time we meet. Some of these will be introduced in detail during this class meeting. They will include intertextuality (aka allusion, reference), engagement with the history of language (English, in particular), work across languages, and myth (inevitably tied to certain types of intertextuality). ¶ We’ll also discuss some meanings of poetics, and how a poet has a particular poetics — an overall project motivated by particular goals and purposes.
OPP: “i do in all honesty love this world,” Steve Ely. In Eely, Longbarrow Press, 2024, p.100.
OPP: “Samurai Song,” Robert Pinsky. In Jersey Rain, FSG, 2000, p. 3.
OPP: Pages from Silk Poems, Jen Bervin, Nightboat Books, 2017, pp. 76–81. Also view images from the project and read about the project overall.
OPP: “Phantom Twin,” Katy Lederer. In The Engineers, Saturnalia Books, 2023, p. 74.
OPP: “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” Charles Bernstein. In Girly Man, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 7–9.
OPP: “Hospital Writing Workshop,” Rafael Campo. In Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems, 1994–2016, Duke University Press, 2018.
OPP: “Mayor Koch,” Homeboy Sandman. From the album Rich II, 2024.
OPP: “Sonnet,” Terrance Hayes. In Hip Logic, Penguin, 2002, p. 13. Please use this link to read the poem and its title; it is preferable to leave the notes for after our class discussion.
OPP: “→ Greek → Hawaiian →,” Rena Mosteirin. In Experiment 116, Counterpath, 2022, p. 9.
OPP to be announced.
OPP to be announced.
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/conceptual 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 other 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 poets 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 poetic composition that can have a point to it in particular circumstances.
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.