Welcome to Fall 2021!

1. Attentive Reading. You will leave the course with a heightened sensitivity to lineation, rhyme, meter, syntax, diction, deixis, typography, spacing, and other forms within a poetic text. You will also learn how to describe the world or voice of a poem or poet through corpus-driven, historical, and/or biographical research. The former will strengthen your analytical skills, while the latter will challenge you to synthesize wide-ranging kinds of information.

2. Essay-writing. You will learn to write essays which have the potential to contribute to literary scholarship, or which could lead to journalistic pursuits and other genres of writing, including the personal or “lyric” essay. Your final essay will display a complex understanding of its subject matter and incorporate detailed analysis of its primary texts. Its argument will be compellingly argued and thesis-driven, and hence follow the basic conventions of modern academic writing while still revealing an unmistakable personal style and mode of thinking.

3. Values. What makes a particular poem (or topic, or song, or subject) more powerful than another one? How about a particular method of reading or speaking about poetry? To what extent is value dependent on personal preferences? How do these preferences come to be, and what effects do they have on the world of poetry? And how can I communicate the importance or relevance of my poetic values to others in different domains? You will be able to articulate answers to these questions by the end of the course.

Communications #

• Announcements will be sent via Canvas after each class detailing the assignments for the following class. They should also arrive in your email inbox without delay.
• Please send all course-related communication to my email, dp625@cornell.edu. Do not use Slack to private message me, simply because I will have my notifications off and respond much more readily to emails. Do not worry about sending too many emails! It is better to ask too many questions rather than too few.
• If you have questions that might be relevant to others in the class, ask them via #general in Slack. If you find an error on the website, bring it up in #general.
• I am available to meet privately via Zoom; use the link calendly.com/dp625 to schedule a meeting. Open office hours will occur once per week for an hour over Zoom, through the Zoom tab in Canvas. The exact time will be set by week 2, pending course survey.
• If you are unsure about your grade on an assignment or feel concerned about your grade, do not hesitate to ask me about it; I will try to give you whatever guidance is necessary to help you improve on subsequent assignments.

Materials #

All readings will be made available on Canvas, linked to the schedule on this website, or uploaded to Slack. Please do not circulate slides, handouts, scans, or any other course materials online, as some of the material may be copyrighted and only available for private, educational use.

You are encouraged to read beyond the course materials. Use the library; use JSTOR, use HathiTrust and other databases. You can check out books from other libraries using BorrowDirect if they are currently unavailable at Cornell.

If you’re interested in buying books, check Abebooks and Powell’s for discount prices. Buffalo Street Books and Odyssey Bookstore are some local options with curbside pickup. While electronic books have their benefits, physical books enable casual encounters with random pages and invite rereading. Tablets are also recommended for marking up texts.

FWS Requirements #

There will be five essays, 1-4 will be given a letter grade.

Essay 0 – “First Day” – 1-2 pages (August 28)
Essay 1 – “Rhyme, Line, Meter” – 3-5 pages (September 24)
Essay 2 – “Poems in Dialogue” – 3-5 pages (October 22)
Essay 3 – “Literature Review” – 3-5 pages (November 19)
Essay 4 – “Final” – 8-12 pages (December 10)

Essays 1-3 count for 20% each, Essay 4 counts for 40%. See individual rubrics for each essay as they are released for exact grading criteria. Essays 1-3 may be revised multiple times up to a week after feedback is received; Essay 4 will go through a drafting process, but may not be revised if the first version is turned in after a specified date. Any essay may be turned in up to 24 hours after the first deadline with no penalty. After that, the student is responsible for sending “status updates” informing the instructor of their progress. Late essays do not receive a penalty, but a draft turned in close to the final revision deadline will not be given an extended revision window.

It is possible to earn an A+ in this class if and only if you receive an A+ on Essay 4. I may nominate up to two students per term to submit work to one of the Knight Institute’s FWS prizes.

Please follow MLA citation and style guidelines, with Times New Roman font. Be sure to put commas and periods inside quotation marks: “Hello,” he said / She said “hello.” There is one special rule for this class: use 1.7 line spacing, not the typical double-spacing.¹

Participation #

1. Kick-offs: Each student will be responsible for “kicking off” class discussion once per term. You may initiate a kick-off by providing some commentary on the day’s readings and asking a few discussion questions. This should take no more than 10 minutes. If you miss a kick-off and fail to reschedule it, then your grade will be capped at an A-. The exact assignments for kick-offs will be determined at the beginning of each month.

2. Canvas discussion board posts and peer review exchanges are essential and cannot be missed. You can submit them a bit late if need be, without any penalty, but a missed assignment will lead to an A- cap on your final grade.

3. We use Slack to share brief responses to poems and prompts prior to (and sometimes in) class. The quality and consistency of your output on these assignments is strongly correlated with your performance on the essays, but does not directly contribute to your grade. Use it as a forum for note-taking.

4. If you miss class, send an email letting me know—it’ll help you stay accountable. You may miss up to 3 classes for any reason before your grade is capped at an A-. Missing more than six classes will lead to a B+ maximum, more than nine leads to a B, etc. Arriving more than 10 minutes late three times counts as an absence. Sleeping in class will result in a concerned email from me and counts as two absences, since it can be distracting to others. Please get enough sleep! If you miss more than three classes due to a documented illness or some other crisis, I will consider lifting the grading cap, but you must communicate swiftly in order to avoid ambiguity regarding the reasons for your absence.

5. Try to speak up during every discussion, or at very least once a week. If you’re naturally shy or have difficulty participating in impromptu discussions, send me an email with a comment or question after class. Grades are capped at an A- for students who rarely participate in or outside of class.

6. At the end of the course, there will be room for student presentations. These are opportunities for you to share material with the class that we would not encounter otherwise, and to share what you’ve been working on for your final essay. These presentations are ungraded and entirely optional; on average just two to four students elect to present.

7. Participation-related grading caps are cumulative, so if you have missed four classes and a kick-off, then your grade would be capped at a B+.

Grading #

The final grade is calculated by taking the weighted average of the four essay grades and subtracting any participation-related penalties. A projection of your final grade will be appended to the feedback on Essays 1, 2, and 3.

Zoom #

If you need to quarantine, you may attend sessions via Zoom. However, the classroom is unlikely to have microphones capable of picking up the sounds of your classmates’ voices, so you may have trouble following the discussion.

Policy #

• This webpage is subject to change at all times. Substantive edits will be announced via Canvas. The instructor may make exceptions to the grading policies listed above in rare circumstances, and only in ways which would apply to every student.
• Writing submitted for this course may be read and shared among other members of the class on the Canvas site, typically for peer review exercises.
• Writing submitted for this course must have been written for this course and not another and must originate with you in form and content with all contributory sources fully and specifically acknowledged. See Cornell’s Guide to Academic Integrity. Penalty for a violation of the code is normally an ‘F’ for the term.
• This instructor respects and upholds University policies and regulations pertaining to the observation of religious holidays; assistance available to the physically handicapped, visually and/or hearing impaired student; sexual harassment; discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and gender identity. Students are advised to become familiar with the respective University regulations and are encouraged to bring any questions or concerns to the attention of the instructor.
• If you have a disability-related need for this course, provide the instructor with an accommodation notification letter from Student Disability Services. Students are expected to give two weeks’ notice for requested accommodations. If you need immediate accommodations sooner, please speak to the instructor about your need by the end of the first week.