Welcome to Spring 2021!

1. This course is focused on developing skills for attentive reading. You will leave the course with a heightened sensitivity to line, meter, rhyme, and other linguistic forms in poetry. 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. Writing is revising, and the best revisions arise from collaborative efforts. You will learn to approach writing as a kind of dialogue with yourself, poems, poets, peers, scholars, and the world. The essay sequence is meant to guide you toward writing a final paper that is much more meaningful and surprising than anything you could have accomplished in isolation.

3. You will walk away from this course with a stronger sense of what you value and why you value it. What makes a particular poem (or topic, or song, or subject) more powerful than another one? 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?

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.

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 (February 12)
Essay 1 – “Rhyme, Line, Meter” – 3-5 pages (March 6)
Essay 2 – “Responding” – 3-5 pages (April 3)
Essay 3 – “Punctum” – 3-5 pages (April 23)
Essay 4 – “Final” – 8-12 pages (May 19)

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 after feedback is released. 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 #

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.

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.

If you miss class, send an email letting me know. You may miss up to 3 classes for any reason before your grade is capped at an A-. Missing more than six classes leads 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 lead to a concerned email and counts as two absences, since it can be distracting to others. Please get enough sleep!

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.

Participation-related grading caps are cumulative, so if you have missed four classes and rarely participated in class throughout the term, your grade would be capped at a B+. I will let you know how you are doing with participation (Slack, DB posts, peer review, attendance, discussions) when returning feedback for Essays 1, 2, and 3.

Grading #

The final grade is calculated by taking the weighted average of the four essay grades and subtracting any participation-related penalties.

Zoom #

If you need to access class online, reference the Canvas “Zoom” tab for access. Do not share the Zoom meeting information with outside parties. Keep your camera on, as it improves the quality of conversation. Mute your microphone when not speaking.

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.
• Writing submitted for this course may be read and shared among other members of the class with student permission, 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.