Readings and Assignments for the Week of September 26-October 2, 2005

Tuesday, September 27, 2005:

Please read Chapter 5 (The Sound (and Look) of Sense) from Writing Poems.

(Special guest reading by Elliot Harmon today!)

Thursday, September 29, 2005:

Please read Chapter 7 (Tale, Teller, and Tone) from Writing Poems.

And here's the memoir prompt from The Autobiography Box for blog posts due on Sunday, October 2:

Is there a piece of music that reminds you of a particular time and place in your life? In Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, there is a violinist named Vinteuil who plays a simple and not very interesting theme of music. But as the years go by, Marcel finds that even a mediocre piece of music can carry with it lots of memory. The music that may cause an outpouring of memories for you may be a Beethoven sonata or a silly pop song. Thin of one of these tunes and describe the memories that come to you.

Don't forget that Poem #2 (A Poem About Family and/or Childhood Memory) is due on Tuesday, October 4!! Here are the guidelines:

Please write a family-related poem and/or a poem of childhood memory.

The challenge of this assignment is to write a poem dealing with family and/or chilhood memory that completely avoids hackneyed language, cliche, and sentimentality.

The poem should incorporate concrete details and sensory images.

Be sensitive to the music of language, and carefully consider how sounds are determined by word choice, line length, line breaks, etc.

Please make sure to give your poem a title, and that your poem is typed/word-processed.

And finally, here's a listing of upcoming literary events that you might want to check out! (Don't forget that you can do write-ups of outside literary events to replace up to two absences and that you will need to attend a minimum of one outside literary event to write one of your Writerly Immersion Papers:

Sunday, September 25, 2005: Omaha Slam Team Members reading at U. Brew, 7:00 p.m.

Thursday, September 29, 2005: VLP Poetry Slam (with Featured Readers Elliot Harmon and Alex Charalambides), Coffee Shop Gallery, 7:00-9:00 p.m.

Thursday, October 27-Saturday October 29, 2005: John R. Milton Writers' Conference (Three days' worth of readings by prize-winning authors, and creative/scholarly panels on the theme of "Frontier Nostalgia." Featured readings are free and open to the public, or, as an USD student, you can register (before October 1) for the entire conference for a cool $5). Click on the website listed below for a complete schedule of events, info on featured authors, and a downloadable registration form:

John R. Milton Writers' Conference Website