Teaching

ENGL-4957-210 Southern and Appalachian Poetry

    Every place has its own poetry. “The music of what happens,” is how the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney characterizes it. Together, we will study the particular kinds of music made by poetry in the American South, with particular attention to our home region of Appalachia. One of the oldest purposes for poetry is the recording and passing down of traditions and ways of life. In this course, we will look at the ways, traditional and not-so-traditional, that poets have responded to the culture of the South. Authors studied will include some of the major American writers of the past century, such as James Dickey, Robert Penn Warren, and Kathryn Stripling Byer.
Required Texts:
     The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. 3: Contemporary Appalachia, edited by Graves, Ruffin, and Wright. Texas Review Press, 2011. ISBN: 1933896647.
   The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, 2ND ED, edited by Stokesbury. University of Arkansas Press, 2000. ISBN: 1557285799.

ENGL-3141-001 Creative Writing I - Poetry

    Creative Writing I will focus on poetry this fall. This class is designed to help you learn the techniques, habits, and discipline of writing literary poems. We will study in the whole craft of writing poetry, generally based on the model used successfully in the other arts, and will learn by observing, imitating, and practicing the approaches used by accomplished poets. It is not simply a “writing workshop,” though we will spend a good deal of time considering and discussing poems that you write and submit to the class. We will read great poems from the past and present, and do our best to write some great poems of our own.
Required Texts:
      A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz, ISBN: 0156005743
      The Poetry Home Repair Manual, by Ted Kooser, ISBN: 0803259786.
*This course is writing intensive.

ENGL-4022-001 American Poetry

     In this course, we will try to read American poetry without any preconceptions (impossible, of course, but we can try): we will not, for example, automatically assume that Colonial poetry is always about religion or politics, or that Romantic poetry is shallow or bizarre (Longfellow and Poe), or that students can refer to Whitman and Dickinson as “Walt” and “Emily,” or that E. A. Robinson is a “traditional” poet, or that Frost was a “nature” poet, or that Stevens is too complex, or Williams too simple, or Cummings too weird. You may, however, consider Eliot an “academic” poet if you want to. *This is an oral intensive class.
Required texts:
     Leaves of Grass & Other Writings, Walt Whitman. Norton (2nd Ed.) ISBN: 0393974960
     The Oxford Book of American Poetry, Lehman. Oxford UP. ISBN: 019516251X

ENGL-3010-001 Poetry

This course is a study of poetry as a genre with attention to its form and techniques. Reading and analysis of poems written by acknowledged masters of the genre will be included.
Prerequisites:
ENGL-1010 and 1020 or equivalents.
Required texts:
The Norton Introduction to Poetry, 9th Edition, edited by Hunter, Booth, and Mays. ISBN: 0393928578.
The Best American Poetry, 2011, editors Lehman and Young, ISBN-10: 1439181497.
*This course is oral-intensive.

ETSU Dept of Literature and Language