Training in writing expository prose. Further instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

When accepting the National Book Award in 1960 for his poetry collection Life Studies, the poet Robert Lowell characterized the state of contemporary poetry as follows: "Two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw. The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners. There is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal." This course will focus on what Lowell in 1960 called “the raw,” as represented by Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (published that same year) along with the work of many fellow travelers. The traces of this literary history are inscribed everywhere around Berkeley, from the "Poetry Walk" on Addison Street to the collections of manuscripts and small press materials housed in the Bancroft Library. Many of the poets that we will read performed their work in Cal Hall during the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965, and a few were even graduates of Berkeley themselves. In reading these poets, we will ask: what makes a poem "cooked," as opposed to "raw"? what kinds of thinking or doing -- or thinking and doing -- are involved in the creation of poetry? and, finally, how can we understand poetry as first and foremost an activity, rather than as something "we" (who?) simply sit down to read? This writing-intensive course is designed to improve students’ skills in both writing and thinking. Over the course of the semester, students will write and revise two papers, the first analytic and the second based on individual research. Accordingly, students will be instructed in how to locate and engage with primary and secondary sources as well as in how to properly employ them so as to advance their own original claims.

Book List:

Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (University of California Press, 1999)

Requisites

• Previously passed an R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Previously passed an articulated R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Score a 4 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Literature and Composition. Score a 4 or 5 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Language and Composition. Score of 5, 6, or 7 on the International Baccalaureate Higher Level Examination in English.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills