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WRITE-6020-3: Docupoetry: Keeping it real, Integrating the Nonliterary

Fall 2023

Subject: Graduate Writing
Type: Seminar
Delivery Mode: In-Person
Level: Graduate

Campus: San Francisco
Course Dates: August 30, 2023 — December 12, 2023
Meetings: Fri 4:00-07:00PM, Hooper GC - GC7
Instructor: Denise Newman

Units: 3.0
Enrolled: 5/8

Description:

Documentary poetry refuses the limits of journalism and archive, and also of lyric poetry. Combining these approaches yields a nuanced, more immediate investigation. Muriel Rukeyser, whose long poem The Book of the Dead we will explore, believed documentary images constituted one kind of reality and poetry another—“'Poetry can extend the document.” We will also study works by poets such as Bhanu Kapil, Anne Carson, Layli Long Soldier, C.S. Giscombe, Don Mee Choi, and Mai Der Vang. Documentary film, photography and theory will help us understand ethics of the field, and point toward the use of archival material. All semester students will be writing and researching topics of their choice to complete a chapbook-length work of docupoetry.

Pre-Requisites and Co-Requisites:

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