English 816-001
Seminar in Poetry Writing: Sound Composition
Instr: Kilwein Guevara, Maurice
Office: CRT 512; 229-4520
e-mail: maurice@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: T; 3:30-6:10pm; CRT 284
Course Description
This should be a fun, exciting class. The focus of this writing seminar will be an exploration of the roles that sound and sonic structures play in the composition of poetry. Roughly one-third of the course will have us reading and listening to a variety of sonically-inflected work, including audio and/or written texts by Kurt Schwitters, Steve McCaffery, bp Nichol, Emily XYZ, Brenda Cárdenas, and e.e. cummings. We'll listen to the performance of a song by John Dowland (England, 1597) and an excerpt from John Moran's The Manson Family: An Opera (USA, 1992) as well as an indigenous collective prayer ceremony from Oaxaca, Mexico. We'll look at/listen to sound as an organizing device in formal verse as well as in experimental poetries. We'll lend our voices to collaborative sound compositions. We explore non-vocal sounds in concert with verbal/vocal poems. The remaining two-thirds of the course will involve students bringing in their own sound-sensitive, original poems-in-progress for feedback and discussion by the class. I encourage anyone who is genuinely interested in the subject to enroll, from any of the plans in English as well as graduate students from other departments on campus.
