This Spring I am teaching a graduate seminar at Columbia.

Lines and Lineage: Contemporary American Poetry by Women
Writing is often a solitary activity and yet most poetry is born out of a dialogue—a conversation between poets and other artists or texts. In this seminar, we will look at the ways in which contemporary women poets are directly and indirectly influenced, inspired and mentored by other women poets or by poems written by women. Women being mentored and influenced by other living women is a recent phenomenon. We will discuss what it means (for women and men) to live at a time when the field of contemporary poetry by women is rich and various and the ways in which gender should or does enter into mentorship and poem writing. We will read poems by: Lucie Brock Broido, Rita Dove, Miranda Field, Katie Ford, Jorie Graham, Arielle Greenberg, Fanny Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Katy Lederer, Chelsey Minnis, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Molly Peacock, Kristin Prevallet, Ariana Reines, Brenda Shaughnessey, Eleni Sikilianos, Tracy K Smith, Elizabeth Treadwell, Cathy Wagner, Anne Waldman and Rebecca Wolf. Primarily, we will read as writers—thinking about how to engage with these poems through our own writing—rather than as scholars. We will pay special attention to how these poets influence each other and how they influence us. We will also discuss the ancestral foremothers of these poets (including Sylvia Plath, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson and many others), and students will be asked to complete a final project in which they trace their own poetic lineage.

Lines and Lineage Books:
(required)
Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker (Iowa, 2007)
Deposition by Katie Ford (Graywolf, 2004)
The Garden Room by Joy Katz (Tupelo, 2006)
The Heaven Sent Leaf by Katy Lederer (Boa, 2008)
The King by Rebecca Wolff (Norton, 2009)
Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg (Saturnalia, 2010)
Overlord by Jorie Graham
Deposition by Katie Ford
Body Clock by Eleni Sikelianos
Grave of Light by Alice Notley

Strongly Recommended:
Swallow by Miranda Field (Mariner Books, 2002)
The End of Beauty by Jorie Graham (Ecco Press, 1999)
Selected Poems by Fanny Howe (University of California Press, 2000)
Deposition by Katie Ford (Graywolf, 2002)
Saga/ Circus by Lyn Hejinian (Omnidawn, 2008)
Unraveling at the Name by Jenny Factor (Copper Canyon, 2002)
Cornucopia by Molly Peacock (Norton, 2004)
Anything you can get by Kristin Prevallet
IOVIS by Anne Waldman (Coffee House Press, 1992)
Duende by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf, 2007)
Satan Says by Sharon Olds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980)

Click here for the syllabus.