Spring Semester 2010 Plan

This is my intended plan for the 2010 semester, as I move into the BFA program from the IBA program. It finishes with my natural science requirement, retains an intense social/political focus while moving on to questions of literary traditions, craft, and ethical writing. I don’t think I’ve missed anything:

Modern and Postmodern: Voices of Collection
• Selections from The Arcades Project (Benjamin)
• On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Stewart)
• The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (Baudelaire)
• Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies (A)
• Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (T)

(This course explores specific strategies for documenting, researching and compiling art and cultural ethnography. Focusing on modernist writers, such as Baudelaire, and new postmodern imaginings, such as Reframings, questions of how criticism, critique and documentation have changed will be explored. A major focus will be on developing personal strategies and goals for personal research and how this research can be used to enrich personal writing.)

Environmental Science and Poetics
• Selections from American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (McKibben, ed.)
• Selections from Sisters of the Earth: Women’s Prose and Poetry About Nature (Anderson, ed.)
• The Alphabet of Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing (Statmen, ed.)
• Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet (Botkin)

(This course explores both environmental science—including biology, geology, chemistry and other fields dominated by the scientific method—with the creative pursuits of writers in the field of nature writing. Using anthologies, many different writers across traditions will be explored, with a special attention to the inclusion of female nature writers. How the genre of nature writing has developed, evolved and been challenged by its writers will be explored as literary movement. Special consideration will be given to the exploration of different forms of nature writing for personal use. In examining both science and poetics, ethical considerations of writing will be examined and the natural landscape of American life will be celebrated.)

Spectres and Imaginings: Understanding Sexual Orientations
• Other Voices, Other Rooms (Capote)
• Choir Boy (Anders)
• A Single Man (Isherwood)
• Fun Home (Bechdel)
• Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Ahmed)
• Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Love)

(This course focuses specifically on how LGBTQ individuals have represented their experiences and lives in regards to sexuality. The novels (graphic or otherwise) will be in explored in the context of how the authors construct their lives in their writing. How do they use language? How does the language that they use evolve in the context of changing visibility or historical events? In addition, theoretical work will explore the idea of “orientation” throughout the readings. How do queer writers interpret history, what implications does this have on memory, and how do these implications influence the craft of writing? Self writing in poetry and narrative will explore new ways of writing personal experiences with queerness.)

Writing Tragedy: Race, Nation and the Politics of Poetics
• Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (Hemphill)
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde)
• My Happiness Bears No Witness to Happiness (Hoffman)
• Selections from Collected Poems, 1947-1997 (Ginsberg)
• The Writing of the Disaster (Blanchot)
• Selections from Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Foote)
• Selections from Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War (Danner)

(In this course, the questions of how writers from different ethnic backgrounds, time periods, and nations write in tragedy. Using poetry, personal narrative, and hybrid genres, the questions of how self is constructed from marginalized experience will be explored. In addition, how these various writers choose to represent their lives in regards to genre will be explored. Why do some writers choose the particular genres that they do? What strategies do they employ within that genre in regards to their use of language? Ethical considerations from academic perspectives will supplement these creative explorations.)

Dear Mr. President

The other night I heard you talk about
How you wanted to increase troops in Afghanistan
But I am not pleased.

We need to end this war, this bloodshed.
I am tried of hearing how So-and-So(ldier)
Was blown up yesterday in a roadside bomb
Or how an errant bomb hit a schoolyard,
Leaving a bunch of six year old schoolgirls
Bloodied or dead, without any future.

The other night I heard you talk about
How you wanted to increase troops in Afghanistan
And I wanted to cry.

I heard you talk about this morality
Our “great” nation seems to have,
On and on like you’re stealing lines from Bush,
But where’s the acknowledgment of
Hegemony or imperialism?
Pick up a copy of Zinn or Chomsky, Mr. President,
Maybe you’ll find some truth in there.

The other night I heard you talk about
How you wanted to increase troops in Afghanistan
And my mouth was agape.

You wrote away Native Americans forced into exile,
Japanese Americans we interned,
Iraq we just invaded, Vietnam we still remember,
Jim Crow we can never forget
And so much else you called a moral authority.
But all our history demonstrates is injustice.

The other night I heard you talk about
How you wanted to increase troops in Afghanistan
And I wondered:

How it was you possibly won the Nobel Peace Prize.
I see no peace here, Mr. President.
You had the choice for peace and you chose war.
Whatever medal you may have won
GIVE IT BACK. PLEASE!
Give it to some woman in Afghanistan
Who Fights, risking her wellbeing day-after-day,
To see that women have a say in political process
Or someone else who values protecting human life.

The other night I heard you talk about
How you wanted to increase troops in Afghanistan
And I wept.

Whatever happened to change?
Why are we repeating history so frighteningly?
When are empty promises going to be fulfilled?
Why must so many die in the name of our moral authority?

Machete

The machete is sharpened
Against stone,
Weak rays of sunlight
Illuminating ground
Before night consumes
The urban landscape.
In a tongue uninhibited
And rough a simple
Proclamation is spoken:
Faggots will die tonight.

The heavy breathing,
Just a mile down the road,
As two lovers fuck ceaselessly
Moans suspended
As if a pianist presses a pedal.

Machete against fingertip
Draws blood, drop of red
Hitting the black stone
As Sun falls asleep for Night.
In a tongue uninhibited
And rough a simple
Proclamation is spoken:
The blood will enrich the nation.

The final climax
Too beautiful to be described
As arms are draped
To form a formless being:
Absence of definition from ecstasy.

Machete catches slivers
of moonlight
Glimmers illuminating
leaden boots that sink
briefly in soft soil.
In a tongue uninhibited
And rough a simple
Proclamation is spoken:
God wishes this disease be purged.

The final moments,
The I love you,
The I love you, too.
The way the boxers sit low on the hips.
The affectionate peck, so agile.
The most perfect silence before knock.

Then the pounding,
At first a whisper and then a roar,
The taller of the two opens the door,
A soft light illuminating
the towering shadow,
Hand moving forward, machete
Headed toward flesh
Almost instantaneous,
Blade edging into flesh.

Lover listens to the sound
As the blade exits,
A terrifying squelch,
As the hard thud of the body
Against the floor makes it real.

The last moments alive,
Lover hears his own breath
And the heavy footsteps,
Unable to move or unwilling,
He cannot bear to live his life
Forever remembering executing,
He utters only three words:
God be good,

As he meets same instantaneous fate,
Towering shadow watching over,
In pure satisfaction, black blood
Pooled in crevices of messy sheets.
In a tongue uninhibited
And rough a simple proclamation:
The deed is done.

Machete glimmers red
As he sets back into moonlight,
Heavy boots sinking for an instant
Into soft soil, but he is not alone:
Specters whisper out into moonlight,
Out into country, into hearts
A haunting melody of their time alive,
Unwilling to take silence until there is justice.