TEACHING MATERIALS:
NOTES, EXERCISES, SYLLABI, BOOK LISTS

Metaphor

Language that implies a relationship involving similarity, between two things, and so changes our understanding of either or both:

• “A fine-spun lace of ice covered his body.” (120)

• “Fine pencils of gold spilled suddenly from the little circles in the manhole cover and trembled on the surface of the current” (119).

• “Lit by yellow stems from another manhole cover was a tiny nude body of a baby snagged by debris and half-submerged in water” (119).

• “From the perforations of the manhole cover, delicate lances of hazy violet sifted down and wove a mottled pattern upon the surface of the streaking current” (115).

• (Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground)

• “We are forced to wear the mask which society has created.” (Student Paper)

Mixed
Metaphor

Using 2 or more inconsistent metaphors in a single expression.

• “The storm of protest was nipped in the bud.”

• “The individualist is a mere plant exposed to the pitfalls of failure.”

Simile

A figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, dissimilar thing by the use of like as, etc.

• “She gave me kisses sweeter than wine.”

• “The old woman was as big as a house.”

• “And that was how the world aboveground now seemed to him, a wild forest filled with death” (Wright 139).

Simile &
Metaphor

Her tears flowed like wine, her tears flowed like wine—She’s a real sad tomato, she’s a busted valentine.

Language—
(from Latin)
lingua= tongue)

A form of human behavior that involves using vocal sounds in meaningful patterns
and (when they exist) corresponding written symbols
to form & express
thoughts & feelings.

Any method of communicating ideas; a system of signs, symbols, gestures or the like:

•  deaf-and-dumb language;

•     the language of algebra;

•     the language of dance

Dialect—

A variety of language that differs from the standard or literary usage of the society in which it exists

A regional variety of a language which differs from other varieties by pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary
(Walter Morel speaks the dialect of Nottinghamshire.)

Vernacular—

colloquial language non-literary; the standard native language of a region

Jargon—

specialized language used by people working in certain fields, often not understandable by people outside those fields (“credits”, “core courses”, “thesis” are examples of academic jargon)

Lingo—

term used humorously or contemptuously for a language one finds it hard to understand: (“I don’t speak their lingo”, or, “He started throwing around his medical lingo”.)

Idiom—

a peculiar speech form within the usage of a given language. (“I’ll fix you”; “All he thinks about is getting laid”; “It was no big deal”)

Bullshit—

meaningless phrases, empty words, often intended to sound meaningful; phony language

Writing Exercises drawn from various classes 1969-1974

Write a description of yourself in the third person, from the point of view of a member of your family—parent, brother or sister, grand- parent, husband, wife, or other. The description should include:

In order to write this you will need to do two things:

Your first step in writing should be to make a rough draft in which you get your initial ideas or impressions onto the page. Don’t struggle for corrections in this draft. You will be rewriting several times. Vitality, the flow of your ideas as they come, are the most important things at this point.

Write a description of a course you would like to take some day—on any subject, or covering any kind of material. Talk about how you feel this material could best be taught, and what you would hope to be doing in the course. (It might be film-making, writing, history, some technical skill, contemporary issues, art, etc.) Talk about how you’d like this course to be run, under what conditions you would most enjoy and profit from it—how much classroom time how much reading and writing, how much individual work with a teacher, field trips, etc. If you know books you would like to be reading in such a course, name them, telling why you chose them. Also tell why this particular course would seem valuable to you, what you hope to gain from it for your life.

Your old high school friend Paul has moved to Philadelphia and you haven’t seen him in over a year. Write him a letter, describing your year at C. C. N. Y., discussing such things as classmates, courses, teaching, the April-May crisis, differences between highschool and college, what you expected to find here and what you actually found. Try to give Paul some concrete sense of the realities of the place as you have known it.

The Board of Education hearings on school decentralization are going on now. You have been asked, as a graduate of one of the city’s public schools, to write your opinion as to the value of decentralization, arguing for or against it from your own school experience. Your essay will be read and considered as part of the testimony in the hearings. Be sure to support what you say with actual experiences and facts which you encountered as a student in the New York City school system.

Write an analysis of your neighborhood. You may use description as part of your technique but you will need to go beyond it. Some questions you may want to ask and answer:

1. Into what parts, or subdivisions, does the area divide itself?

2. What do you observe that is unique? What do you observe that is typical of anything? What is there that shouldn’t be there? What isn’t there that should be there?

3. How does the neighborhood relate to a larger context?

4. When do you, walking along, begin to feel that you are in “your” neighborhood? What makes you feel this?

5. Is there any general statement of interest that you can make about the neighborhood?

First draft should be finished on Wednesday. You will have Friday to rewrite.

Write at least 200 words in which you imagine your future after college: the kind of work you hope to be doing, the kind of place and lifestyle in which you would like to live, what you look forward to in terms of personal relationships and your own development.

Try to begin with a sentence introducing the major idea of your essay—that it is a description of your hopes and fantasies now about the future. Try not to end with a cliff-hanger—give your paper some sense of real conclusion. Please proofread carefully and revise.

We have read and talked about LeRoi Jones’ essay ‘Cuba Libre’. One of the points made in the essay is the extent of lying by the daily press.

Write an essay on lies, or a lie, that you encountered while growing up. Some areas you might look back on are: lies told by teachers; by parents; lying by other children; lies you told yourself; lies in news- papers and magazines; in advertising, political speeches, sermons, movies, TV etc. How did these lies affect your thinking, and how and when did you begin to identify them as lies.

Write an essay in which you compare C.C.N.Y. with Crossgates.

Begin by drawing up a comparison frame or listing the points you wish to use for comparison. Some of these might be:

• Purpose of each institution

• The physical environment

• Meaningfulness of the education given

• Codes of belief—moral, social, intellectual; conflict? Relationships between students and teachers or staff

• Caste system among students—privileged/underprivileged groups Ultimate source of power and control

• How institution reflects the society outside

In checking off these or other points by Orwell’s essay, you will of course have Orwell’s own description and analysis to refer to. In the parts of your essay where you are writing about C.C.N.Y. you will have to make your own analysis of the institution. This will mean, not just reading, or writing, but thinking, observing what you see around you, what you feel as a student, etc.

Writing for Monday, October 18: (at least 3 pp.)

In our society, everyone is constantly being assigned roles: the role of student, of teacher, of parent, of the “good son” or the “black sheep”; the role of employee, of boss, of criminal, of leader, of follower, of oppressor, of victim, etc. Some of these roles are given us by our families, some we take on for ourselves, some are handed us by society and its institutions.

Reflect on your own experience and think of a situation in which you took on a role or were given a role which felt uncomfortable or unpleasant to you; where you found yourself playing a role you didn’t like. Write about this situation, how it occurred, who was involved, what the environment was, how it felt to you, and how you finally reacted to it.

Try to get away from abstractions and create a live situation, an ac- count which will put the reader into a close relationship with your feelings and experiences in this situation. Try not to use the word “role” but show how an unwelcome identity or function was forced upon you or taken on by you.

HINTS ON REVISION

Everyone has his own way of writing a paper, and everyone finally learns to deal with revision in his own way. These are some suggestions that might work in the process of finding your own best method. Some people revise heavily as they go along, with many scratchings-out, insertions and alterations in the first draft. Others like to get their thoughts onto paper straight off, even if in extremely rough form, before attacking problems of form and style and correctness.

Much depends on the kind of writing you are doing—whether it’s a research paper, an imaginative creation, an emotional argument, a documentation of facts collected. The first principle of revision is the same for all, however—DON’T LET YOUR FIRST DRAFT BE YOUR LAST.

1. After you have your first draft, it’s time to reconsider the basic structure of the paper. Is the length appropriate to the scope? Does the opening sentence, the opening paragraph, function as it ought—i.e. to bring the reader into the subject with which you will deal, to set forth the problem, to state the assumptions you are working on? Does the paper start by being about one thing and end up being about another? What connection is there between the opening and closing sentences? Should the connection be clearer and more precise than it now is? Is there a real ending or does the paper simply break off abruptly without any summary or conclusion?

   A piece of writing is like a piece of architecture: it has a certain purpose which will dictate its size (length), foundation structure, style, materials used, and the interrelation of all these things. You don’t hire a bulldozer and steamshovel to excavate a huge cavity, if all you’re going to put up is a chicken-coop. You don’t try to build a parking garage on a tent platform. The overall structure of a piece of writing needs to be considered critically after it is finished, to make sure that it’s functional, neither too fragile nor ridiculously overdone for the purpose.

   Revision at this point might take the form of rewriting the opening or closing paragraphs, trying to make the diction consistent, cutting out unnecessary words, adding necessary illustrations to support an argument that needs propping.

2. Then—you may find this is a point at which to re-copy or type up the whole, not in a final draft but in order to see through the undergrowth of revisions and insertions already made.

3. Next might come a reading-through aloud to check for common grammatical mistakes: agreement of verbs and nouns; tenses of verbs; reference of pronouns. Know your own worst enemies among these and double-check for them.

4. In a separate reading, preferably also aloud, check the structure of your sentences and the punctuation which holds them together.

5. Another reading with attention focused on spelling and capitalization should be necessary. (Also watch for words omitted in copying.) Are there quotation marks around all the quoted material?

6. Finally, try to write your final draft out consciously, not mechanically; you will pick up some errors and avoid slips of the pen this way.

Instructor: Adrienne Rich

Course Description:

In material, the course touches on a variety of literary forms. My hope would be to stimulate students to write in a number of forms encountered through the reading: essay, biography, poetry, fiction, argument. The only unifying device for the course is that each book studied is one which has strongly affected the instructor. I have tried, however, to strike a balance between Western European and white American writers and black writers; and to maintain where possible a dialogue between the works of those writers. (E.g. between Eldridge Cleaver and Plato.)

Reading:

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

• Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! (chapter on Douglass and the Abolitionists)

• Autobiography of Malcolm X

• Selected mimeographed poems—African and American

• Richard Wright, “The Man Who Lived Underground” in Black

• Voices, ed. By Abraham Chapman

• Plato’s REPUBLIC (I. A. Richards’s translation)

• J.-P. Sartre, No Exit

• Albert Camus, The Plague

• Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (selected passages)

Method:

Each week one long writing assignment and one short in-class paper. Papers read aloud in class frequently and discussed. Assigned reading is presented first with some historical perspective by the instructor—e.g. with Frederick Douglass I talked briefly about pre-slavery conditions of servitude in the South, the early importation of slaves and the institutionalization of slavery through legislation; with the Republic, about the city-state of Athens in Plato’s time, Greek religion, the life and death of Socrates. Beyond that, insofar as possible the class does the talking and discussion is as general as it can get. I try to raise questions of style—e.g. the contrast between Wm. Lloyd Garrison’s inflated Latinate introduction to Douglass and Douglass’ own clear & lucent writing. Also of the meaning beyond the actual plot of a story or poem — what does it mean to be a man underground — what does ‘underground’ connote, etc.

Individual conferences dealing in detail with each student’s written work are scheduled as often as possible—never often enough within limitations of time and schedules.

Papers are marked for grammar, diction etc., but also long comments are appended as to the ideas & arguments presented. No grades on papers—students voted against them in favor of critical comments.

[Assignment from English 1.8 class above]

Assignment for Monday, February 9: Read in BLACK VOICES, pp. 114-160

(Richard Wright’s story, “The Man Who Lived Underground”)

Probably you will want to read this story at least twice and let its details soak in. Ask yourself some of the following questions:

What actually happens in the story, and to what kind of person?

Is this story realistic? Do you feel that it describes events that could actually take place? Or is it utterly fantastic?

What is given in the first paragraph to tune you in to the situation of the protagonist?

What is a protagonist?

What does it mean to live underground? What associations does the word arouse in you?

- - - - - - - - - -

What do the following sentences mean to you—if anything—:

(p. 118) “Just singing with the air of the sewer blowing in on them…”

(p. 122) “These people were laughing at their lives, he thought with amazement.”

(p. 129) “He possessed them now more completely than he had ever possessed them when he had lived aboveground. How this had come about he could not say, but he had no desire to go back to them.”

(p. 132) “He felt that his stealing them money and the man’s stealing were two entirely different things.”

(p. 134) “They were serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him, branded him guilty.”

(p. 138) “He had triumphed over the world aboveground! He was free!”

(p. 140) “Maybe anything’s right, he mumbled.”

(p. 143) “He felt that their search for a happiness they could never find made them feel that they had committed some dreadful offense which they could not remember or understand.”

(p. 147) “For a split second his eyes were drowned in the terror of yellow light and he was in a deeper darkness than he had ever known in the underground.”

(p. 149) “He was the statement, and since it was all so clear to him, surely he would be able to make it clear to others.”

(p. 160) “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things.”

protagonist.—main character in a drama, novel or story, about whom the action centers. A person who plays a leading or active part. (from Gr. protagonist, agonistes-actor)

agon.—the conflict of characters in a drama (From Gr. assembly, contest)

agony.—

1. great mental or physical pain

2. death pangs

3. a convulsive struggle

4. a sudden, strong emotion (as agony of joy)

antagonize.— 

1. to contend against, oppose

2. to incur the dislike of, make an enemy of

What does protagonist mean?

Who is the protagonist of this story?  What do you know about him?
What is the plot of this story?  With what or who is he in conflict?

Episodes (separate events)

1. Entrance into the sewer

2. Basement church service

3. The dead baby

4. The undertaking parlor

5. The movie theatre

6. Food & sleep—dream

7. The office with safe

8. The radio shop

9. The butcher shop

10. The robbing of the safe

11. The decorating of the cave

12. The accusation, beating & suicide of the night watchman

13. Emergence into the upper world

14. Entrance into the church

15. Visit to the police station

16. Return to the sewer

Symbol: “Something that stands for or represents another thing, especially, an object used to represent something abstract”

“Written mark, letter, abbreviation etc. standing for an object, process, quality, quantity, as in music, mathematics, chemistry etc.” (these are really signs)

Notes for English 1.8

Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South. Knopf, 1956

Ulrich B. Philips, Life and Labor in the Old South. [Little Brown and Co.,] 1929

PLANTATION—from Latin plantare, to plant

Dictionary meaning:

1. a colony or new settlement

2. an area growing cultivated crops

3. an estate, as in a tropical or semi-tropical region, cultivated by workers living on it

4. a large cultivated planting of trees

In Tudor & Stuart England (17th century) = a large or small colony—hence Virginia was a plantation of the London company

1st workers = indentured servants from England, Scotland, Ireland.

“As to significant numbers the Africans were late comers fitted into a system already developed.” (Stampp)

Indenture—men, women & children of lower social class bound themselves for 5–7 years of servitude—their passage to colonies paid. At end of period indenture they were free, & master furnished them with outfit of tools, clothing & a barrel of corn.

Some convicts, others victims of kidnapping.

Some married into master’s family & thus had indenture cancelled.

Difference between this type of servitude and chattel slavery of later centuries.

1619—1st boatload of 20 black slaves brought to Virginia.
Earliest blacks were not chattel slaves, though treated more abusively than white servants—term of servitude often longer, more indefinite. Gradual development of legal distinctions between the white servant & black chattel slave.

1. No restrictions by law on treatment of black labor.

2. No written indentures for blacks defining their rights and limiting terms of service

3. Gradual realization of Southern landholders of advantages of slavery to older forms of servitude

1st legal distinction between white & black servants made in 1660’s in Maryland & Virginia:

1. Blacks to be slaves for life

2. Child must inherit condition of mother

3. Christian baptism didn’t change slave status

Later—laws defining slave as property; giving disciplinary power to master; prohibition of interracial marriage.

“By the 18th century color had become not only the evidence of slavery but also a badge of degradation. Thus the master class, for its own purposes, wrote chattel slavery, the caste system, and color prejudice into American custom and law”. (Stampp)

PLANTATION OF COLONEL EDWARD LLOYD IN TALBOT COUNTY, MD.

“Planters differed about how many slaves could be directed efficiently by one overseer on a single agricultural unit. Some divided their plantations when they owned less than 100 slaves; others worked many more than that on undivided estates. But usually a large landowner whose slave force had grown to more than a hundred observed a decline in efficiency, because of the long distances the hands had to walk from their quarters to the fields, and because of the inability of an overseer to give close supervision to so many laborers. Such a large planter might split his estate into two or more separate enterprises”. (Stampp, The Peculiar Institution)

Colonel Lloyd—275 slaves in Talbot Co.—plantations produced wheat, corn, hams, wool, hides.

Douglass belonged to Thomas Auld, who = chief overseer for Colonel Edward Lloyd.

Acc. to Douglass, Lloyd owned 200-300 slaves on home plantation alone, many more on adjacent farms owned by him. (over 20 in all)

Home plantation =

• seat of gov’t for all 20 farms

• settlement of disputes punishment of difficult slaves

• disbursement of food (monthly) 8lbs pork, 1 bu. corn meal

• clothing (yearly)

(Compare Douglass on food & clothing, p. 28, to Phillips, p. 197)

This is the first half of a two-semester course whose purpose is to give you as many opportunities as possible to write, receive criticism and revise your writing. We will work toward a place where you can criticize and proofread your own work and become your own editor.

Writing does not “come naturally”. Every person has important things to say, but often s/he is kept silent by the feeling that s/he “can’t put it into words”. This class will try to begin “putting it into words”. We will work out of the experiences and feelings of the people in the class, with readings in fiction, anthropology, and poetry, and with papers written by students.

Writing can be for anyone a source of pleasure, self-knowledge and power. It is also a fundamental college skill. As we work closely with Anthropology 10.91 Q, we will be trying to get the tools which will serve you in all your college courses: the skill to describe, summarize, analyze, support an idea with concrete examples, criticize and evaluate what you read, etc.

You will be writing in class once a week (or oftener) and will be asked to write about ten short papers at home. We will pay special attention to the process of going from a first draft to a second to a more finished piece of writing. You will also be asked to keep a journal in which you write at least half a page daily. The papers will be criticized and graded, the journals handed in every few weeks, read by me, and returned ungraded but with comments.

Conferences are an important part of the course and I will want to see each of you individually several times a semester. Also, by the second semester, students should be working together in teams, criticizing each others’ work and helping each other rewrite.

As a teacher, I expect you to care about your writing as much as I do. I will read every word and punctuation mark; I expect you to reread and rewrite your work with equal concern.

The students who get the most from this class—as I have found out year after year—are not necessarily the ones who find it easiest to write in September. They are the ones who want to work and struggle as every writer must, with words and meanings.

BOOKS:

• Tytell and Jaffe, Affinities: A Short Story Anthology (Crowell)

• Tillie, Olson, Tell Me A Riddle (Delta)

Please use 8½ x 11” ringed-notebook paper for all your work. This helps both of us keep track of papers.

This class will start from the idea that language—the way we put words together—is a way of acting on reality and eventually gaining more control of one’s life.

The people in the class and their experiences will be the basic material of the course, about which we will be talking and writing. In writing, we will be trying to define the actual experiences we ourselves are having, and to make others more aware of our reality as we perceive it.

The reading will consist of writings in which the authors or their characters have tried to understand and criticize their situations, and to change or move beyond them.

We will be using the following books:

• Ibsen, A Doll’s House and other plays (Penguin)

• D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (Viking)

• J. Rothenberg, ed., Technicians of the Sacred (Doubleday)

• The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

We will also use other materials which will be duplicated and distributed as needed.

Individual conferences about what you have written will be an important part of this class. My office hours are on Monday and Thursday from 10-1, and at other times by appointment. My office is in M-4, Room 946.

[Notes on class above]

Sons & Lovers:    an autobiographical novel. All fiction draws on experiences & observations in the author’s life. But in the autobiographical novel the writer is to more or less ext. following the plot of his own life. Piri Thomas = writing story of his life in novel form, using dialogue, vivid descriptions of action, suspense etc.

Many young writers begin by taking the experience of childhood & adolescence, leaving home, becoming a man, as plot of 1st novel. They are close to these experiences—can relive them vividly inwriting.

1 reason for writing = to go back into one’s experiences & see what you find there. Long-forgotten details, a pattern that you didn’t recognize while living it.

Another reason: telling it like it is. Piri Thomas describing his world both for young Puerto Ricans coming up & for people who are ignorant of it. Richard Wright trying to reveal the white world as seen from inside an angry black man’s head.

[Fall, 1974?]

T., Th., 8:35-10 a.m.

Mott 801

Looking closely at poems by several British and American male poets (with emphasis on Keats, Whitman, Yeats, Lawrence, Frost and Jarrell) we will explore how the image of woman appears in them as persona (voice), myth, emotionally-charged metaphor, and lightning-rod of sensibility. My purpose is not to reduce these poets in terms of their male chauvinism or sexism, but to understand better how women function in men’s imaginations and how we have hitherto seen ourselves in man-made mirrors

Some questions we will consider:  (1) What recurrent themes or stereotypes do we find in the poems?  (2) How does the male poet deal with his own femininity?  (3) How have images of women in the male poetic tradition reflected or failed to reflect, or contributed to, the realities of sexual politics?  (4) What does the poet’s use of women tell us about what it is to be a man?  (5) How is the woman reader, the woman poet, affected by these poems?

We will begin with some background reading which explores the uses made of women in patriarchal society, and some poems which embody typical poetic conventions regarding women. We will then go more deeply into the six poets chosen for in-depth reading. We will read a good deal of poetry aloud, trying to grasp the poems as sensuous objects as well as in terms of theme.

A core course in poetry, or considerable past reading of poetry, is strongly suggested.

Texts:

Background reading:

• (due Sept. 19): S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Ch. IX (“Dreams, Fears, Idols”) and Ch. XI (“Myth and Reality”)

• (due Sept. 24): “Woman As Outsider” in Woman in Sexist Society, ed. by V. Gornick and B. Moran (Signet) pp. 126-144

• “A Historical and Critical Essay for Black Women in the Cities” in

• T. Cade, ed., The Black Woman (Signet) pp. 198-210

• Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes, Ch. II (“A Man’s God”) (Fawcett)

The above will be on reserve in the library, but all are worth owning.

To be owned and used in Class:

• Carlos Baker, ed., Keats: Poems & Selected Letters

• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Signet)

• M. L. Rosenthal, ed., Selected Poems of W. B. Yeats

• The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Viking pb)

• Untermyer, ed., Robert Frost’s Poems

• Randall Jarrell, Complete Poems

You will be asked to keep journals during the semester in which you try to keep track of ways in which the reading and discussion intersect with your own life and thinking. The journals will be called in twice during the semester.

There will be one in-class written paper, to be announced.

Since grades have to be given, I will base them on participation in discussion, the journals, and the in-class paper.

Some suggested readings for those wanting more background in Sexual myths, sexual politics, recent re-interpretations of patriarchy:

This list is personal and rudimentary—but reading begets reading, one thing leads to another, etc.

POETRY. There are an increasing number of anthologies of women poets, including No More Masks ed. by Howe and Bass; Louise Bernikow ed., The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America; Chester and Barba, eds., Rising Tides; The Other Voice, an anthology of 20th century women poets in translation, forthcoming in 1975 from W. W. Norton and edited by a women’s collective at Berkeley.

See also: Judy Grahn, A Woman Is Talking to Death, published by the Women’s Press Collective, Oakland, Calif. (paper)

Kenneth Pitchford, Color Photos of the Atrocities (Atlantic-Little Brown pb) Poems of male homosexuality, struggle in a marriage, fatherhood, the politics of what Pitchford has named “effeminism”—a man’s commitment to feminism.

[Notes on Eng. 13.3 W, above]

Assumptions behind course:

1. Art (poetry) is profoundly connected to psychology & to politics. What does this mean? 1st: poetry is line into unconscious, like dreams. To remember and understand our dreams is to learn something about the unconscious forces working in us. People put into poems “more than they know they know” (Frost). But the images in a poem or a dream reflect both the individual unconscious and a collective one which is a product of culture. Jung speaks of the archetype—a per- sonification of fears, desires, attitudes—e.g., the innocent child, the witch, the virgin, the wise old man, figures such as we find in fairy tales, myths—and poetry.

   and 2d: Poetry (all art) connects with politics in that it comes out of a political situation. Who writes, who they write for, how the poet views himself in relation to society, is determined by who has power, who gets educated, who remains illiterate, who can get published. Until very recently for instance homosexuals could not write openly of their sexuality without being banned, censored and treated as obscene—e.g. Whitman; Blacks, especially women, were too busy fighting for survival to write; still, women and minorities have trouble finding recognition in the white male tradition. White males have held power throughout the Western tradition, and so most of the poetry we have to read is by white males. No accident. Yet this poetry is considered “universal” while that of women and oppressed peoples is not.

   Moreover within the literature of oppressed peoples women are still not “in the mainstream”.

   This must be reflected in the way women are seen in the poetry of men.

2. We live in a patriarchal society—all institutions, economic, social, religious, educational, are dominated by men. Women as the first and universally most oppressed people. It’s also a dangerous society which neglects human life & is killing us spiritually and physically, poisoning us, starving us, raping the earth and ocean, lying to us, polluting our bodies & minds. I see no excuse for studying literature in a way which does not come to grips with this fact. We can’t read poetry or anything else as if it were a world apart form what you see as soon as you start home from City College.

3. Society—the patriarchy—is full of unexamined assumptions, tabus, roles. We have been taught that sexuality is a private matter— we now begin to realize that sex is at the root of all politics.

4. One sense of our time is that we’ve lost touch with the unconscious forces in us, the cosmic, the great natural forces. People have turned to psychedelics, meditation, astrology, the Tarot, Eastern mysticism, quite rightly seeking for what patriarchal capitalistic technocracy has crushed out of our lives. Poetry is one of the resources we can turn to for re-connection with the unconscious forces.

   In other words: I want this course to be useful as well as beautiful.

Poets chosen for intensive study:

• Keats, Yeats, Lawrence, Jarrell — obsessed by women though in very different ways

• Whitman—homosexual, writes openly erotic poetry about men, strongly attuned to women

• Frost—occupies a very bleak & lonely world—the world of the American frontier myth—what place does woman have in it?

Background reading:

• de Beauvoir—the FIRST! Remember it was written in the ’fifties. Her style isn’t easy—take notes as you go along.

• Gornick—picks up on de B’s theme of Woman as The Other

• Robinson et al—connect sexism & racism

• Figes—good straightforward discussion of religious myths about women

• Keep noting down themes you perceive in background reading, also questions you want to raise in class.

Bias I come with:

I’m a woman poet who grew up with little except the male poetic tradition to draw on. The poets I’ve chosen for this class have all, at different times, meant a lot to me. I can criticize them today from a feminist perspective without simply trashing them.

What does my being a radical feminist mean in the classroom? It means I’m concerned with the consciousness in the poem as much as with its sensuous presence. I’m interested in the ways patriarchy has failed to brainwash some of its sons—particularly poets, —but also I’m concerned with identifying the dead stereotypes that still brainwash us, perpetuate male supremacism, rapism; and with the way poetry can help us change or keep us imprisoned in old ideas of power and powerlessness.

My experience, both personal & political, has taught me that the denial of full humanity to women is the root of every form of oppression; the root name of the system that is close to destroying life on this planet is patriarchy: the system of domination by males. Almost every part of so-called human culture is a product of male dominance and male supremacy. The very language & definitions we use to describe ourselves have been generated by males.

I identify with women, but I am interested in teaching men who want to explore thru poetry what the patriarchal system in which they collaborate is doing to them. I can communicate with men who want to think, struggle and change, but my primary loyalty is to women.

If this sounds shocking, remember that the loyalties of most male teachers are finally to continuing a system of male privilege and to leaving unquestioned a male tradition in literature.

BOOKS TO BUY, BEG, BORROW, STEAL, OR READ STANDING-UP IN THE BOOKSTORE

This is not a definitive or even balanced reading list. It contains books I’ve related to, books other students have related to, books you might relate to. Most are in paperback; all should be in the library. Standing-up in the bookstore is strenuous but many a good book has been read that way.

There is no order to this list, but it contains samples of nearly everything.

Thomas Hardy, JUDE THE OBSCURE. A novel of a working-class youth in 19th century England whose ambition is to attend the university; of his attempts, frustrations, destructive involvement with two women.

Jean-Paul Sartre, NO EXIT and THREE OTHER PLAYS (Vintage Book). Plays about hell, racism, revolution, oppression and individual responsibility, by a celebrated contemporary French novelist and philosopher.

Victor Hernandez Cruz, SNAPS (Vintage). Poems by a 20-year-old Puerto Rican, very much alive.

Friedrich Nietzsche, SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR (Gateway Editions). Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher-poet, writes a book supposedly in tribute to his teacher Schopenhauer. In fact, it’s an essay on becoming what one really is, against the forces (educational and social) that try to make one into something else. An attack on the academic world of that time, still relevant today.

Addison Gayle, editor, BLACK EXPRESSION. An anthology of criticism by black writers on black literature.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, THE GREAT GATSBY. A novel of the American 20’s, involving a mysterious millionaire with a secret dream, by one of the most gifted novelists this country has produced.

Walter Lowenfels, editor, IN A TIME OF REVOLUTION (Random House). Poems by writers, black and white, who have been influenced by the rhythms and themes of Jazz Poetry.

Leroi Jones, HOME (Apollo Editions). A chronological collection of essays by the poet and playwright, tracing his movement toward militancy. He writes on non-violence, Cuba, soul food, African poetry, Malcolm X, language—you name it.

Joseph Conrad, VICTORY. Love and violence on a tropical island, among other things.

K. Stampp, THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION. An extremely readable account of the origins, development, day-to-day realities of slavery in the U. S.

William Carlos Williams, SELECTED POEMS (New Directions). This poet believed that poetry ought to sound close to speech, and deal with daily experiences and objects (“No ideas but in things”). Also look at his long poem PATERSON, which has as its hero the city of Paterson, New Jersey.

Albert Camus, THE STRANGER (Vintage). A short, tense novel about an average “little man” living in Algiers during French colonialism; and how he comes to face execution for a meaningless murder.

Jan Myrdal, REPORT FROM A CHINESE VILLAGE (Signet). The free-lance Swedish journalist Myrdal, with his photographer wife, received visas to Communist China in 1962. They lived for months in a rural village and interviewed most of the people about the facts of their lives both before and after the revolution. Day-to-day life is described in detail—food, working schedules, family life, education, politics, holidays.

Leo Tolstoy, THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH and other stories (Signet). The title story is that of a wealthy, successful, upper-class lawyer who, on his deathbed, begins to wonder what the meaning of his life has been. The scene is pre-Revolutionary Russia; the author, one of the great novelists of all time.

Kurt Vonnegut, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE; OR, THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE. Part science-fiction, part anti-war novel, yet more than either of these; about an American who served in World War II, lived through the fire-bombing of Dresden (in which more lives were lost than at Hiroshima), and gets kidnapped to a mysterious planet called Tralfamadore.

Gary Snyder, EARTH HOUSE HOLD (New Directions). Part journal, part essays, by a West Coast poet; he is interested in tribal tradition, American Indian culture, Zen, people encountered around the world while working on an oil tanker, the American wilds. He’s an unstructured, very personal writer and unlike anybody else. A recent volume of his poems is called THE BACK COUNTRY.

D.H. Lawrence, KANGAROO. A novel about Australia, involving a secret fascist organization, a strange leader, and the fascination of the continent below the equator.

AFRICAN FOLKTALES AND SCULPTURE (Bollingen Series). This is a huge, heavy, fantastically beautiful book of photographs of masks, ritual carvings, etc. from Africa, accompanied by legends—earthy, humorous, mysterious—from African oral tradition. Sometime when you’re in the library, take a look.