Rickey Laurentiis

Sense, the Sentence and Syntax

This class studies the relationship between the various ways a poem offers or constructs meaning — that is, "makes sense" — and the tactics it uses to literally embody that meaning, via the line, sentence and verbs. About this "making sense," we'll consider it in at least three ways: first, as any of those deliberate moments commonly called the image that gesture, relate to or otherwise awaken the body's five senses; second, as that overall moving, if transforming, logic or "sense" of identity or argument that drives the poem; and, lastly, as sensibility, not just the poem’s atmosphere, tone or stylistic tics but the poet's as well. Along with each, we’ll labor to see specifically how syntax (sentence structure, length, deployment, verbiage, meter and more) underwrites, enacts or, even, subverts or queers what sense is available in the poem. In short, we'll reveal, if not collapse, that ground which sits between "subject" (identity) and "form" (body) in both our own work and the work of a selection of published poets.

The Body

“I sing the body electric.” So announced Walt Whitman in his first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. Possibly, it announced as well what would become a prevailing subject, if not at times a cliché, in American poetry: “the body” as image and metaphor, as abstraction, and, perhaps, as literary inheritance. Certainly, notions of the body have not ceased to be explored and complicated since Whitman. We find, for example, Wallace Stevens resigning that “the body dies” but “the body's beauty lives” in the early part of the 20th century; though for Sylvia Plath, it may be only a woman’s “dead body” that “is perfected.” Later in that century, Lucille Clifton celebrates the (black) female body in poems such as “homage to my hips” and “poem in praise of menstruation,” while in the first decades of the 21st century it’s “the arbitrariness of gender and having to have a body” at all that still obsesses—and torments—Frank Bidart. Most recently, the body as symbolic figure or as object remains central, if controversial, in Kenneth Goldsmith's “The Body of Michael Brown” and, as if in response, there’s Morgan Parker insisting in her poem, “Magical Negro #84: The Black Body” that, in fact, “The body is a person./The body is a person./The body is a person.” Through these and many other examples, this class aims to offer a much-abbreviated survey on the (d)evolution of “the body” as a subject in American poetry up to the contemporary moment. What is “the body”? Can it be—and how has it been—defined? For whom is “the body”? What can we read from it? Who has the “right” to describe or speak for a particular body, and who doesn’t? What agency or power does or doesn’t “the body” yield? And is any of this related to the body politic or to bodies of art? These and more questions will be asked as we take time to discuss, through close readings of individual poems and occasional essays, various manifestations of the body that may include (but are not limited to) the gendered body, the raced body, the queered body, the sick body, the brutalized body, the dead or “no body,” the politicized body, and more. Additionally, students will be prompted throughout the semester to write poems that engage the body through each of these manifestations and/or poems that respond to arguments about the body as articulated in the published work that we read.


Sustained Revision

Carl Phillips, Jorie Graham, Frank Bidart


“I hardly knew / what I saw. Whatever shadow there was in that world / it was the one each cast / onto the other,” so wrote Jorie Graham over thirty years ago, describing a memory of witnessing two bodies during intimacy—but one wonders if the sentiment might hold true for a given poet’s body of poems, their “work.” The writer Alice Walker has asserted that “you do not study, or critique, or condemn a writer without taking into account their whole body of work… There is a reason it is called a body of work and not an arm or a leg or a tonsil.” This class aims to try out that argument about reading through an intense reading of three American poets: Phillips, Graham, and Bidart. Linked if only by the powerful influence they’ve cast upon contemporary American poetry, we’ll move through the whole bodies of each poet, from their earliest poems to their latest contributions, attempting to tease out what, perhaps, they “hardly knew” they saw, they felt, or believed—at least, until they did. We’ll track each poet’s unfolding ideas, obsessions, images, arguments—their “visions”—and, importantly, also consider how these visions may have shifted, relaxed, come by way of different strategies, assume different voices—that is, all the ways their visions, from book to book, have been revised. To what degree is any poet aware of their (re)visionary practice? Is it a thing one should know? This course focused on close readings of the poems, as well as the occasional critical essay or other supplementary media. Each student conceived of and wrote one long poem, as a way of putting into action some ideas raised in our discussions, delivered in sections over the course of the semester, and leading up to a significant revision by the course’s end.


Queering Poetics, Queering Form


Since at least the mid-1990s, "queer" has emerged as a socio-political and theoretical framework set in opposition to the normative, "stable" or strictly binary. In 2016, then, what might it mean to write a poetics queerly, to insist upon a queer reading of a text or, indeed, to queer a form? In this workshop, these questions and more will be rigorously explored. We'll sharpen our critical skills through very close readings of a selection of published poems and essays, as well as the work of workshop participants. There will be both in-class and at-home writing assignments, and small group activities. Among the still-evolving list of authors and artists we'll potentially discuss include contemporary queer poets, such as Robin Coste Lewis, Frank Bidart, Ari Banias, Marilyn Hacker and Carl Phillips; historical queer voices, such as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf and Ma Rainey; and, finally, figures who, although they may or may not themselves identify as queer, produce or produced work that arguably still “queers” or "troubles" the very notion of the poem or a given poetic form, such as Douglas Kearney, Robert Hayden, Cathy Park Hong and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Potential participants should arrive not so much ready to toss what perceptions, conventions or ideas they have of the poem/poetic form out of their thinking, as much as be prepared to turn those perceptions, conventions and ideas on their heads, in-side out, out-of-sorts, to pervert them into some productive "new" space or, as Roger Reeves perhaps more succinctly puts it, to allow some "iron bars" to "queer a field."


“Radiance versus Ordinary Light": An AWP Tribute to Carl Phillips

with Dawn Lundy Martin, Erin Belieu, Justin Phillip Reed, and Carl Phillips; organized by Rickey Laurentiis. “At a time when to speak candidly about the vagaries of erotic, sexual and moral life was still taboo, Carl Phillips broke into the American literary landscape to amass a signature body of work earning him near legendary critical acclaim and respect. Especially for queer poets of color who follow him, his influence and literary friendship spanning nearly thirty years is no less essential. This diverse panel of poets celebrates that radiating legacy, ending with a reading by Carl Phillips himself.”

Crisis & Pleasure

Some will go to crisis, while some will come by pleasure. Some will go to pleasure, while some will come by crisis. Cry, sis: that’s okay. Please her: let it be okay. And, like this, like this, not by the “line edit,” by the “manuscript,” and not simply by the “workshop,” will we proceed. We will proceed. We make it. Although we will, of course, be attuned tightly to the poem, as to the meditation and some essay, if you are in direct need of these items I have quoted or what they call up this is not the workshop for you. This is a seminar, a series of tumbling lectures, guided discussions, close readings and somatic prompts and rituals, that intends to move with care as with knowing, which is about following the gut, what always the poem initially calls up spontaneously, emotionally, your first mind, what later the power resigns itself to be by craft, distinction, tranquility. And the basic thesis we will peruse is this: that crisis is necessarily creative; it expedites change, through what we make in it we have a chance to survive it, and we experience this making as pleasure. Necessarily, the basic warning attending this thesis is this: the crave of pleasure, the overindulgence or addiction to pleasure, can become, often catalyzes, its own crisis (a kind of “American Convenience”), insofar as excess, any excess, unmitigated can become a critical situation that requires intervention. But are all crises organic, or can they be concocted, lied into being? Aren’t we in a crisis, in many, what specific practices, in and around the “poesis” might help us manage it? And is it true that the always feeling good, or simply the want to always feel good, corrodes like a sugar? We will endeavor to know, together, by an ethic and respect of care. Students will need to have purchased and ready to read two books before our first session, “Meditations: A New Translation,” by Marcus Aurelius and translated by Gregory Hays (only this translation, please) and “Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good,” edited by adrienne maree brown. All other texts will be provided digitally.

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