Dear All,
I am very much look forward to working with you this quarter, getting to know each one of you, rolling up our sleeves and experimenting with various forms of writing that explore the politics of language arts, performativity, creativity and protest. In the end, we’ll all hopefully have developed a good body of writing, done some performative work, and gained some understanding of the modern and contemporary guerilla poetry/poets theater landscapes.
* We’ll spend our first class–this Tuesday (tomorrow), 5:30pm in B1105–discussing what we’ll be doing during the quarter, course expectations and syllabus, how things will generally shake out in terms of schedule, your projects, your collaborative work, and so forth. There is no reading due for Tuesday (the first class), although I will take some time to discuss some ideas taken from the first reading attached, Theodore Adorno’s essay “The Culture Industry.” You should also plan on one or two very short additional readings for Thursday–these I will give you tomorrow, and, with any luck (let us pray to the email gods), also send them via email. If you can get started with this essay, great! If not, don’t worry–we won’t be getting very deeply into any text tomorrow and I certainly don’t expect you to have read this by the time class begins–it’s just here to get a start on.
* For those of you on the waitlist, please come to class on Tuesday (first class), as during the first week there is always fluctuation in enrollment, so it is quite possible we’ll be able to find a spot for you. To that end, please bring an add/drop form from the registrar to class sometime this week, either Tuesday or Thursday (or by latest the following Tuesday). I will then sign you into the class. If there are far too many who show up for me to override all of you, we’ll devise a fair way to proceed.
* For those of you I’ve spoken to about registering, who are not yet registered due to various reasons we discussed and were noted, but are on the waitlist, please, again, bring override (add/drop) forms to class so I can sign you in.
* PROGRAM READINGS: readings will come from 3 sources–
1) The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil (available in the bookstore now, and also, if we run out of copies, available through Amazon, several other places online). This is the only book you’ll need to purchase for this course, so please get it as soon as you can (for those of you on the waitlist, wait, of course, until after Tuesday before purchasing it!). We’ll work with this book by end of the week, so do go ahead and get it!
2) pdfs/handouts, either sent to you via email or given out in class.
3) online links–available on our course blog and, when possible, sent to all of you ahead of time in an email.
Please try to print out (2) and (3) so you have a growing binder or folder of course readings; we’ll refer back to things as we go, so it will be good for you to be bringing all readings (and your writings!), if at all possible, with you each week to class.
* Link to the course blog is below. I used this last quarter, and generally, for my course Experiments In Text. I will redo this blog so that it becomes ours, with new name/title, etc. The course blog will be a repository for all readings that are not pdfs/handouts or in the Kenning Anthology, so please make a habit of checking this blog for new readings every week (new readings will go up soon after each Saturday language lab, usually by Monday afternoons). This blog is also a place where we can have further “conversation” regarding particular questions from the readings and class, workshop our writing, and announce logistical and other updates, etc. It’s advisable, then, for you to bookmark this blog, treating it as one important component of the course.
BLOG: http://blogs.evergreen.edu/wolachd/
Finally, as a supplement to our conversations/creations/experiments, I’ll often recommend that you check out some feature or another on my public blog, confusingly also called “Experiments In Text.” Here it is: http://davidwolach.blogspot.com/
This blog, again, is supplemental; it is the first address (the evergreen blog) that you’ll want to pay consistent attention to.
Well, that’s it for now. Let this serve as the beginning of having unbridled, thoughtful, rigorous, playfully serious, sociopolitically mindful, empathic, and strangely important fun as co-conspirators.
See you Tomorrow!
In Solidarity,
David