course texts

Yeah, the memo said book orders were due June 19th; and yeah, I got mine in yesterday (July 19). So sue me. I could present my orders a year in advance to the campus bookstore at Our Fair University & they'd still get something wrong, or be unable to find some small-press thing.

In case you're wondering (I know that throngs have been on the edges of their seats awaiting this information), here's what I'm teaching from:

In the undergraduate Milton course (as I've discussed before), I'll be using the newish Modern Library edition of The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, & Stephen M. Fallon.

(Which reminds me – I was conversing earlier this evening with an old friend of J.'s, currently house guest here by the ocean, about the 19th-c. American novel course I did last Fall, & I remarked that every book on the syllabus, Hawthorne Melville Alcott Stowe James Twain & Chopin – with the partial exceptions of Chopin & Twain [Connecticut Yankee, it was] – was written in something I call "19th-century novelese." You know, complex sentence constructions, big unfamiliar words, a bit of stylistic stilt-standing, etc. And most of my students had a pretty damned hard time with it. And then I thought, Jumpin' Jesus on a Pogo Stick!, I'm teaching Milton's controversial prose this Fall. What kind of a bloody masochist am I, anyway?)

In my graduate poetry workshop, we'll be spending time with the following:

•Louis Zukofsky, Selected Poems (yes, I know, New Directions will be shortly releasing new [corrected!] editions of Complete Short Poetry and "A" – but for the nonce, this is all that's in print)

•Lorine Niedecker, The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems

•Martin Corless-Smith, Swallows

•Eric Baus, The To Sound

•Janet Holmes, The Ms of M Y Kin

•Brenda Iijima, If Not Metamorphic

•Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

•Liz Waldner, Trust

A rollicking good time will be had by all. Really.