ModPo announces: “SloPo” mini-courses for winter/spring 2020

We here at ModPo are very pleased to once again be able to offer brand new SloPo mini courses to any and all ModPo students who want to join them. Two of these courses will be led by our longtime TAs, Jason Zuzga and Jake Marmer, and two will be led by our wonderful CTA pal Mandana Chaffa. Read on for brief descriptions of the courses, and for information on how to sign up for each of these courses. 

First, from January 19 to February 9, join Community TA Mandana Chaffa in reading a selection of contemporary female poets. Here’s a brief description from Mandana: “In Contemporary Female Poets: A Tasting Menu, we’ll explore the work of a diverse group of writers, picking one poem per poet, including but not limited to Warsan Shire, Joy Harjo, Nicole Sealey, Staceyann Chin and Adrienne Rich.” Mandana has already posted a welcome message, so drop her a line in this thread so you can stay up-to-date on the mini-course’s progress!

From February 8 to March 28, join Jason Zuzga in discussing non-European traditions and emergent poetries in Anglophone North America.  From Jason: “This year’s class will be focusing on non-European traditions and emergent poetries in or translated into English, using Jerome Rothenberg’s anthologies of translation, especially the American-Indian-based SHAKING THE PUMPKIN, as a starting point. We will interrogate Rothenberg’s concept of “ethnopoetics” and consider the quandaries of putting oral tradition and place-based performance onto the printed page. We will look at the current work of Ofelia Zepeda, who writes in both Tohono O’odham and English and created the first Tohono O’odham dictionary. We will read, listen, and watch poetries of the Caribbean, especially focused on Jamaica, Kamau Braithwaite and Louise Bennett-Coverley. We will consider immigrant poetries that refuse to adopt Western convention, trying our hand, for example, at the ghazal form popularized in the United States by the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali.” To RSVP and receive email updates for Jason’s course, beginning Feb. 8, please drop Anna a line at modpo@writing.upenn.edu with your preferred name and email address. 

From March 30 to May 25, join Jake Marmer in exploring “Modern Poetry and the Spiritual Experience.” From Jake:How do we, as a society, access the sacred in a secular age? Artists of the modern period approached spiritual experience in unconventional ways using dreams, myths, nature, drugs, cities, childhood, illness, sex, death, and everyday pain and joy to get at the ineffable. In this SloPo session, we will also explore a variety of works by modern and post-modern poets as vastly different as Allen Ginsberg, Fanny Howe, Norman Fischer, Sun Ra, Jane Hirschfield, and others. To RSVP and receive email updates for Jake’s course, beginning March 30, please drop Anna a line at modpo@writing.upenn.edu with your preferred name and email address. 

Finally, later this spring, Mandana Chaffa will bring back her enormously popular mini-course on John Ashbery. More details about that course are forthcoming! 

Thanks to Anna for coordinating this SloPo roster.

—Al

P.S. The ModPo team just returned from Seattle and Vancouver, and will soon post photos from the meet-ups held there and sessions with poets. And in the comings weeks and months we will be added new poems and new videos to the ModPoPLUS syllabus.