Syllabus
As a consequence of the end of my enslavement to Moloch and a generous severance, I am considering spending some of my unasked for free time working on a sort of roll-your-own M.F.A., a self-directed seminar/workshop on writing with a dual concentration on poetry and creative non-fiction.
Below is the start of a syllabus. Feel free to make suggestions in the comments, especially on poetry. I am going to also grab the two texts from my 4000 level course long ago at UNO on literary criticism, the exact titles of which I will post when I have my hands on them.
About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews; Delany, Samuel R.
Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetries; Shepherd, Reginald
The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction; Young, Dean
The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life; Bloom, Harold
The Art of Reading Poetry; Bloom, Harold.
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry; Hirsch, Ed *
The Art of the Personal Essay; Lopate, Philip *
The Situation And The Story; Gornick, Vivian *
Twentieth Century Criticism; Handy and Westbrook (old text from my UNO senior criticism course)
The Great Critics; Smith and Parks (the other test from that class)
* Thanks to those on my blind email asking for suggestions who replied. Starred items are the ones from those responses that sound most promising.
or at these independent New Orleans bookstores:
Although these are all by and about fiction writing, creative non-fiction is bound or unbound by the same devices and structures as fiction, so…
“Finding a Form” or really any of his essays on writing–William Gass
“Art of the Novel”–Milan Kundera
“On Writing”–Eudora Welty
I also have Rilke’s and another Latin author whose name escapes me at the moment letters/essays to a young writer and those could likely end up on the list.
More…
“Energy of Delusion”-Viktor Shklovsky
Orwell’s collected essays (4 vol. set)
“The Poet’s Dictionary”-William Packard
All of those Paris Review author interviews, archived and available
As much Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Foucault, Lao-Tzu, Frankfurters (Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, etc.), Zizek, Schopenhauer as you can squeeze in.
I recently bought “The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images”. It is a fine Taschen book with colored plates and bound-in book marks.
I think that you would enjoy it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3836514486/ref=oh_o02_s00_i00_details