W INTRODUCTION TO FICTION AND POETRY II: Spring 2015

The Writing Seminars

The Johns Hopkins University

Instructor
Email

Bobby Mitchell
mitchellr@susqu.edu

Office Hours

TBD in Gilman 61B

Purpose
IFP I and IFP II are required for admission to a major in The Writing Seminars. This course
introduces the student to basic strategies in the writing of poetry and fiction, and in the critical
analysis of literature.
The course is open to all Krieger and Whiting School undergraduates, regardless of major.
Enrollment in IFP II is based on successful completion of the IFP I.
Texts
The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Daniel Halpern.
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th Ed., edited by Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy.
Procedure
1) Students read and discuss assigned texts in classroom discussions. 2) Students write assigned
fiction and poetry sketches and exercises, sharing these with the instructor and fellow students
according to a fixed schedule. Students write every week. 3) Instructor and class comment on
student work in a workshop setting. 4) As appropriate and desirable, students have one-to-one
conferences with the instructor.
Grades
Grades will be based on careful reading of the assigned literature, class participation, the quality
of the writing in daily or weekly assignments, and revisions. Ultimately, students will hand in a
final portfolio containing the best of the written work, revised to the best of the students ability.
Writing Assignments, Final Projects, and Final Portfolios (60%)

Participation and Written Responses to Classmates Work (35%)

Response to Literary Readings (5%)
During the semester, you are required to attend at least one literary reading and to turn in a typed
response (1-2 pages, double-spaced) for one of them. Respond to an element of craft that
especially interested you in the writers work (e.g., her use of metaphor, point-of-view, poetic
meter), or to several such elements.
Attendance
The Writing Seminars policy is to fail a student who misses more than two weeks of a course
due to unexcused absences. One weeks unexcused absence will result in a deduction from
the final grade. Two unexcused tardy arrivals to class will result in the recording of an absence.
Plagiarism Policy
A student who is found to have plagiarized an assignment in IFP will receive an F for the course,
and a notation will be made in departmental records. Students enrolled in IFP I and II are
required to sign an honor code statement acknowledging that they understand this policy.

Part 1: POETRY
Week One: Where Do We Come From?
Readings:
Jan 26: Countee Cullen: Incident (1,446)
Jan 28: Louise Erdrich: Birth (2,006) Jane Shore: High Holy Days (1,952)
Jan 30: John Berryman: A Sympathy, a Welcome (1,547) Cynthia Zarin: Song (2,014)
Hart Crane: My Grandmothers Love Letters (1,410) Assignment 1 due.
Assignment 1:
Write a poem of welcome or prayer for a new child in a family, or write about an incident in a
young childs life that is somehow life-defining or life-changing. Surprise and paradox often
work well in this kind of poem. While using figurative language and any and all poetic devices,
be concrete and specific. Note how Shore places her poem in a synagogue, and Cullen places his
poem on a train.

Week Two: What Are We?

Readings:
Feb 2: Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress (478) Robert Herrick: Delight in Disorder
(355)
Feb 4: Henry Reed: The Naming of Parts (1,564) Edna St. Vincent Millay: The Buck in the
Snow (1,384)
Feb 6: Philip Larkin: Talking in Bed (1,654) Robert Graves: Love without Hope (1,400)
E. E. Cummings: who are you, little I (1,397) Assignment 2 due.
Assignment 2:
Write a poem set in one moment, the presentone that may suggest a remembered or imagined
past, and an imagined future. Nonetheless, the key quality of this poem is that it locates itself in
the now. Marvells poem, above, sees the now as a moment of seduction; Larkins poem
sees it as a silence in which there is nothing entirely right to say. Even the inability to speak can
be a now in a poem.

Week Three: Where Are We Going?

Readings:
Feb 9: John Milton: When I Consider How My Light is Spent (418) Thomas Hardy: The
Darkling Thrush (1,155) Robert Frost: Home Burial (1,228) Robert Lowell: My Last
Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow (1,597) Group 1 sends out pieces for workshop.
Feb 11: Anthony Hecht: The Book of Yolek (1,672) Seamus Heaney: from Station Island
(1,903) May Swenson: Goodbye, Goldeneye (1,543)
Feb 13: Workshop Group 1, Assignment 3 due.
Assignment 3:
Write an elegy for a person whom you, or the speaker, have lost. If you prefer, you can elegize a
thing or qualitysuch as good manners, manual typewriters, a demolished house.

Week Four: Riddles, Secrets, Mysteries

Readings:
Feb 16: E.A. Robinson: Richard Cory (1,212) Elizabeth Bishop: The Moose (1,523) Richard
Wright: from Haiku: This Other World (1,502) Group 2 sends out pieces for workshop.
Feb 18: A.E. Housman: Is My Team Ploughing? (1,175) W. H. Auden: Musee des Beaux Arts
(1471) Walt Whitman: from Song of Myself, part 6: A child said What is the grass? (1,061-2)
Amy Clampitt: Beach Glass (1,609)
Feb 20: Workshop Group 2, Assignment 4 due.
Assignment 4:
Write three haiku; each of these should express, by what it doesnt have room to say explicitly,
some secret or mystery. In addition, write one other short poem that is a riddle, or which
expresses what, for you, is a true mystery.

Week Five: Art in the Mirror

Readings:
Feb 23: John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn (938) Wallace Stevens: The Emperor of Ice
Cream (1,256) W. H. Auden: Musee des Beaux Arts (1,471) Workshop Group 3 sends out
pieces.
Feb 25: W. C. Williams: Portrait of a Lady (1,273) Frank O Hara: Why I Am Not a Painter
(1,730) Emily Dickinson: I would not painta picture (348) Marianne Moore: Poetry
(1,329)
Feb 27: Workshop Group 3, Assignment 5 due.
Assignment 5:
Write a poem about an actual work of art you observe, in person, in Baltimore. You could visit
the archeological museum in Gilman, or Homewood House, or the Baltimore Museum of Art, or
the Visionary Art Museum, or the Walters Art Museumyou choose. As you write about this
object (painting/sculpture/print), keep in mind that your own work of art, the poem, must have
some separate reason for existence beyond simply reporting on the existence of the object. What
does this object make you think about art itselfor, possibly, about poetry itself?

Week Six: Wings Without Birds

Mar 2: Selected Poems from Wings Without Birds, Handout. Workshop Group 4 sends out
pieces.
Mar 4: Selected Poems from Wings Without Birds, Handout.
Mar 6: Workshop Group 4.
Part 2: Fiction
Week Seven: First-Person Narration
Readings:
Mar 9: Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality, Vassily Aksenov;
Mar 11: Sister Imelda, Edna OBrien;
Mar 13: Greasy Lake, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Assignment 6 due.
Assignment 6:
Write three strong paragraphs (half-page or longer) using three different voices. You can borrow
a voice from one of these stories, and try it out on your own material. Think about each word in
the voice, and be prepared to justify its presence.
Spring Break
Week Eight: Childs Point-of-View
Readings:
Mar 23: The Mother, Natalia Ginzburg;
Mar 25: The Conjurer Made off With the Dish, Naguib Mahfouz;
Mar 27: Bestiary, Julio Cortazar, Assignment 7 due.
Assignment 7:
Using The Mother as a model, write two pages describing a person from your childhood (not
necessarily a parent) from a childs point-of-view. Use as hard and critical an eye as you wish,
but make sure youre making the observer and observed sound like real people. Use descriptive
language rather than emotional, reactive language. Decide in advance how old your child
observer is, and stick with that age.

Week Nine: Love and Complications

Readings:
Mar 30: Spring in Fialta, Vladimir Nabokov; Two Gentle People, Graham Greene; Group 1
sends out pieces.
Apr 1: The Habit of Loving, Doris Lessing;
Apr 3: Workshop Group 1, Assignment 8 due.
Assignment 8:
Using the dry, assessing tone (and third person POV) that Graham Greene uses in Two Gentle
People, narrate an episode from your own encounter with a new and attractive other. Write
three pages: first page recounting the meeting; second page, the middle stage; last page, the
ending stage. Use a real incident, but feel free to depart from reality when necessary.

Week Ten: A Stranger Intrudes

Readings:
Apr 6: The Last Mohican, Bernard Malamud; Fat, Raymond Carver; Group 2 sends out
pieces.
Apr 8: A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme, Frank OConnor
Apr 10: Workshop Group 2, Assignment 9 due.
Assignment 9:
Use first person (as Fat does) and present tense to recount to someone else a strange
experience at a party, at a restaurant, or some other such place. Develop the scene so that the
attitude of the narrator at the beginning changes as the story proceeds. Make sure the changes
are connected to whats happening, and are subtle, but perceptible. 3-4 pages.
Or: Using The Last Mohican as your model, write a third-person account of an experience
where an undesired companion decides to attach him/herself to you, and tag along. Start the
account with the last name of the main character. Start another version with the first name, or
with a personal pronoun. Use the strongest approach of the three and write 3 pages.

Week Eleven: Extremes and Transformation

Readings:

Apr 13: The Country Husband, John Cheever; Why I Transformed Myself into a
Nightingale, Wolfgang Hildesheimer; Group 3 sends out pieces.
Apr 15: Action Will Be Taken, Heinrich Boll
Apr 17: Workshop Group 3, Assignment 10 due.
Assignment 10:
Write a tale of fancy like Hildesheimers story. Start with the conclusion; then, proceed to tell us
how one thing led to another. Do not write science fiction. Take your created world and
character very seriously.
Or: Write a short story starting out (as Heinrich Boll does) with the phrase: One of the strangest
interludes in my life was the time Using the word interlude, youre pitching your story at a
relatively high intellectual level, with a serious and exploratory tone. Make use of that tone and
pitch. 4-5 pages.

Week Twelve:
Apr 20: Individual Conferences and Selected Readings from The Best American Short Stories
2014, (Handouts).
Apr 22: Individual Conferences and Selected Readings from The Best American Short Stories
2014, (Handouts).
Apr 24: Workshop Group 1, final fiction project.

Week Thirteen:
Apr 27: Workshop Group 2, final fiction project.
Apr 29: Workshop Group 3, final fiction project.
May 1: Workshop Group 4, final fiction project.
FINAL PORTFOLIO:
Three revised poems; a revised 7-9 page story expansion; revision of one of the two-page
sketches; critical, reflective essay, 2-4 pages; due May 12th .