Weeks 14 & 15: Harryette Mullen's "Urban Tumbleweed" (2014)

Our final book this term will be Harryette Mullen's latest volume, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary (Graywolf, 2014). Mullen's poetic career has been a long and diverse one, starting with the Steinian meditations of her earliest books (as collected in 2006's Recyclopedia), to the Oulipian experiments of Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. In Urban Tumbleweed, we find Mullen changing tack once again, exploring the possibilities of tanka, a traditional Japanese form of thirty-one syllables usually broken into five lines (5-7-5-7-7), making it a sort of super-sized haiku. She explains:

While embracing the notational spirit of this tradition, I depart from established convention in both languages, choosing instead a flexible three-line form with a variable number of syllables per line. I try to adhere to the thirty-one-syllable limit, although I am aware that the number of syllables in a given word can vary, depending on the speaker and the circumstances. "California," for example, sometimes has four syllables, at other times, five.

While this cross-cultural channeling of forms — an African-American poet employing an Asian form — seems startlingly new, Mullen's quick to point out that there are precedents to this: in her end notes to the volume, she discusses the inspiration of seeing haikus by Richard Wright in a collection by Camille T. Dungy. Moreover, she cites Dungy's questioning "the boundaries of nature poetry as well as African American poetry," including "typical assumptions that 'green' is white and 'urban' is black."

Much of the book, which covers the span of a year's worth of daily entries, takes place in Mullen's hometown of  Los Angeles, which is, itself, a nexus of cross-cultural interactions, and her travels (to Marfa, TX and elsewhere) over the course of that year reinforce the place-centric nature of Urban Tumbleweed.

Here's our reading breakdown for the book:

• Tues. November 25th: pgs. 1–61
• Tues. December 2nd: pgs. 62–122

And here are some supplemental resources:

• NPR reviews Urban Tumbleweed
• Los Angeles Times review
• a Boston Review micro-review
• another brief review in Orion

Final Essay (Due December 9th)

For your final essay, you'll choose from one of the three prompts below. While we've read a wide variety of works over the course of the semester, I think that these topics are open-ended enough to allow for meaningful connections to be made between disparate writers. Consider . . .

1. How national identity is exemplified by the poet(s) we've read representing a given country — i.e. its ideologies, the character of its people, its natural environment, its unique problems, etc. Aside from the poet(s) from a given country, your argument might benefit from including the perspectives of poets visiting or writing about that country. Poets with a hybrid nationality will prove to be interesting wildcards for this prompt.
2. How cosmopolitanism and/or the intermingling of cultures, particularly in our hyper-connected contemporary moment, shapes the discourse of our poets.  If choosing this topic, you'd do well to  take into account the malleability of language and/or those poets who've chosen to employ languages other than English in their work.  Likewise, the ways in which our poets depict living in or visiting other countries will also be useful.
3. How the poets we've read have addressed current events, particularly those that transcend national boundaries.  If you choose this prompt, you'll want the event(s) you choose to have thematic unity, but there are more general topics you might choose — civil rights of various sorts (women's rights, racial equality, etc.), economic inequality, war/violence, environmentalism — that will allow you to group together different authors who don't perfectly overlap.

You'll want to make sure that your essays demonstrate a sufficient degree of complexity and so towards that end I'm requiring that you find at least three facets to the topic you've chosen.  Each of these will need to be backed up with plentiful evidence from the texts themselves (this means quotations and summaries/paraphrases of narrative points, all of which should be cited).  Moreover, you'll need to analyze your examples, discussing them in relation to one another.  What nuances and contradictions can you find, creating a more complex understanding of your given topic?

Your final essays should be a minimum of two thousand (2,000) words (not counting your works cited list), and written in MLA style (including a proper header, parenthetical in-text citations and a works cited list at the end), double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman, no tricked-out margins, etc. You'll e-mail your papers to me (in .doc or .docx format; .rtf in a pinch) no later than 5:00 PM on Tuesday, December 9th. Because e-mail is an imperfect delivery medium and the UC system is prone to collapse, take note that I'll reply to each paper received, letting students know that it's arrived safely, so if you don't receive that e-mail, get in touch with me, and should you have any questions or concerns prior to the deadline, don't hesitate to drop me a line.  I'm also sure that we'll have an open discussion of the final essay on Facebook.

Also, please don't forget that tardy papers will be docked a full letter grade for every day they're late and that papers that are less than the stated limit of two thousand words (again, not counting your works cited list) will automatically receive an F. Finally, I will not permit block quotes for this essay — whittle down your quotations to the essential information and make use of summary and paraphrase when necessary.

While two thousand words (roughly six full pages) seems like an endlessly long paper, I can assure you that it's not really a lot of space to discuss these topics in great depth, therefore I wholeheartedly encourage you to dispense with any and all filler, including bloated rhetoric and lengthy five-paragraph-style introductions that ultimately say very little while taking up a lot of word count. Don't hover over the surface of the issues — dive right in and get to the heart of your argument (i.e. evidence, analysis . . .  the good stuff) from the start. I also recommend that unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise, organize your essay around the the facets of the topic you've chosen to discuss, rather than proceeding chronologically or dealing with each author individually, and also that you write through the source texts themselves, as demonstrated in the "Making Effective Arguments" post I put up at the start of the term. You do not need to do outside research for this assignment, and you should avoid lengthy explications of the authors' biographical details or summaries of the plots of texts outside of what relates directly to the points that you are making. Presume that the person reading your paper has read all of the texts you reference (because he has!). Finally, make sure that you are following the conventions of MLA formatting (which can be found in numerous places on the internet).

Week 13: Claudia Rankine's "Citizen: An American Lyric" (2014)

Changing our schedule up a little bit around the Thanksgiving holiday gives us a chance to spend one day looking at one of this year's most celebrated and controversial books, Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (Greywolf), which has just been shortlisted for the National Book Award and will probably also make the lists for the other two big annual literary prizes (the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award) as well. Here's the NBA citation, which sums up exactly why everyone is talking about this book:

In Citizen, Claudia Rankine recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV — everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

Born and raised in Jamaica, Rankine earned both a BA and MFA in the US and has published five volumes of poetry (which have become increasingly multimodal and genre-bending) over the past twenty years. With Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) — an ambitious book that intermingled America's long history of racial injustice, post-9/11 terror paranoia, media manipulation, and the author's own struggles with depression in the face of all these things — Rankine gained widespread attention for her considerable talents. As its subtitle suggests, Citizen continues the mission of Don't Let Me Be Lonely, bringing her focus to present-day tragedies that have filled our news cycle in recent years.

We'll be reading the book's first and third sections, which you can find in PDF format here. There are also excerpts from Citizen available on the Poetry Foundation website, the Amazon preview of the book, and the Academy of American Poets website, along with the reading below at the Split This Rock poetry festival. If you like what you read here, definitely go get the book — unlike some of our other texts this term you can probably pick it up at your local Barnes and Noble or Joseph-Beth — which promises to be one of this year's very best poetry releases.

Addendum: here's another video of Rankine and Robin Coste Lewis reading from and discussing their work that was just posted last week:

Another addendum: PennSound just added Rankine's recent appearance on Between the Covers, a literary radio program on Portland's KBOO-FM. Listen here.

Additionally, here are a few supplemental texts that will provide more selections from the book and some useful contextualization:

• "Blackness Visible," Jonathan Farmer reviews Citizen in Slate
• "On Being Seen: An Interview with Claudia Rankine from Ferguson" by Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker
• Dan Chiasson discusses the book in The New Yorker
• Lauren Berlant interviews Rankine in BOMB
• Shaelyn Smith reviews the book in The Rumpus
• Timothy Liu reviews the book in Coldfront
• The Los Angeles Times reviews the book

Weeks 12–13: Frank Sherlock's "Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated" (2014)

We're moving on from Europe back to North America as we close out the term, with two US poets, and a bonus day of Jamaica-born Claudia Rankine to boot. Whenever I teach this class I make sure that we spend a little time on our own country's poets because the US is part of the world (of course) and I think it's important to trace the sometimes-invisible traces of American identity in contemporary writing just as we'd trace the Australian influences in Pam Brown's work, or the Canadian aspects of Fred Wah's work. This semester, however, I've made that process a little easier in choosing two poets whose latest books are very deeply entrenched in the cities that they call home.

We'll begin with Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated by Frank Sherlock, the current Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. "How lucky I am to be a poet in my favorite city in the world?," he wonders, continuing, "This city raised me, beat the hell out of me a few times, and still reveals the magic of Philadelphia Brotherly Love." While Philadelphia looms large over Sherlock's work as a whole, he's also turned a sympathetic eye to other cities, from post-Katrina New Orleans in Ready-to-Eat Individual (a collaborative book with Brett Evans) or New York during Occupy Wall Street as seen in "Love Letter November 15," the poem that begins this book, and as those locales and agendas might suggest, Sherlock's work is infused with an uncompromising political point of view. Frank also demonstrates a supernatural awareness of voice, of phrasing, of the ability to place a well-worded line, and these pieces are very much tied to performativity — ideally, they need to be heard live, though the poems' careful arrangement on the page helps create a sort of vocal score for the reader. 

Moreover, much like a visual artist, Sherlock's airy placement of individual words, phrases, and stanzas develops a very interesting tension between the minimal and maximal. Many of these works were first published as small-press chapbooks (I'll bring in a few for you to look at), and so, in a way, each page exists as an individual sub-poem within that book, just as each of those books serves as an individual poem within the collection. 

Here's our reading breakdown for Space Between These Lines Not Dedicated:

• Thurs., November 13th: "Love Letter November 15" to "Unlike the Trees"
• Tues., November 18th: "Very Different Animals" to "Feast Day Gone and Coming"

Here are some supplemental links:

• Sherlock's PennSound author page (contains audio for many of these pieces)
• Sherlock interviewed on WHYY's Radio Times
• the Pew Center Fellows' Q&A with Sherlock
• the Philadelphia Review of Books reviews Sherlock's latest
• Rob McClennan discusses the book
• Philadelphia Poet Laureate homepage
• In his role as Philadelphia's Poet Laureate, Sherlock is working with the Bartol Foundation to launch a city-wide poetry project inviting residents to "write their block." Read more about it here (n.b. Sherlock's chapbook, Neighbor Ballads, mines similar ground)
• in case you were wondering what Sherlock's title means (it's something seen frequently around Philly and other old cities) Philadelphia Weekly has the answer