The invalid’s rage […] and the ridiculousness of it all inform

Paul Guest’s wonderful poems, flung one after another in the teeth

of “daily” life, each an act of defiance that affirms the terrible power

of that life. One thinks of Elizabeth Bishops’ lines, “the fiery event/

of every day in endless/ endless assent.”



-- JOHN ASHBERY





Irreversible, permanent physical damage would seem less a potential

source of art than an obstacle to it: it will not lend itself to the work

of imagination; it will not, in a different light, seem a different thing;

it is more powerful as a fact than anything that could be said about it.

Paul Guest does not sentimentalize disaster; it remains irreversible,

immense – and yet it emerges that there are things to be said, about it

and through it, I would not have imagined. An urgent and moving book.



-- LOUISE GLUCK





It's a horrible spiritual truth that the greatest suffering yields the

greatest wisdom, and in Paul Guest's affliction (he's paralyzed) he knows

the radical powerlessness of the human unit that all of us are in the process

of learning. And he knows about death. Yet there's tremendous sexual

force in many of these poems and also, always, blessedly unstoppable humor.

Guest is a spirit to be reckoned with. Here's a body of new work to cheer about.



-- MARY KARR





There is no escaping the circumstances in which Paul Guest produced these fierce

and unnerving poems. He was almost entirely paralyzed by an accident at the age

of twelve. In the meantime he has made himself into a poet with powerful and

unexpected things to say about the world. I am sure that this book is going to get

a great deal of attention because of Mr. Guest's disability and the courage and

determination that the fact of his poems imply. And that won't be a wrong reason

to read them. They are vibrant with news of the world seen from an angle of

experience not available to most of us. But in the long run, I think people will read

them for what is fresh, headlong, surprising and alive and bitter and sweet in them –

for their ability to make us see.



-- ROBERT HASS



A beautiful, breathless torrent of language that is dark or insightful

or funny or any combination thereof, but always on the mark, always

riveting, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge is a terrific

book.



-- MARK STRAND





A seemingly bottom-less gas tank of generosity fuels these high octane

poems- generosity of spirit, language, charm, empathy, wisdom and ironic

goodwill in the face of even the most callous misfortunes. Like the

American culture he documents, Paul Guest's poetry is both funny

and serious, surreal and hyper-real, lyrically self-incriminating

and apocalyptically compassionate. My Index of Slightly Horrifying

Knowledge is a terrific book by a poet we should all read.



-- CAMPBELL MCGRATH

Paul Guest's tragic accident led him to what might have seemed an almost unlivable life, and yet, given his depth of character and imaginative genius, he has managed to write poems that teach each of us how to live his or her own life-its awful and wondrous physicality, its imprisoning and liberating Eros, its uncanny gifting of the miracles deep attention yields, and, always, its adventure. This is hard to fathom unless one reads these astonishing poems, but although Guest has suffered terrible loss, nothing has been lost on him.

Nothing.



-- JORIE GRAHAM



My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

Paul Guest



My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge heralds the arrival of a powerful new voice in poetry. At the age of twelve, Paul Guest suffered a bicycle accident that left him paralyzed for life. But out of sudden disaster evolved a fierce poetic sensibility—one that blossomed into a refuge for all the grief, fury, and wonder at life forever altered. Although its legacy lies in tragedy, the voice of these brilliant poems cuts a broad swath of emotions: whether he is lamenting the potentiality of physical experience or reveling in the electric temptations of sexuality, Guest offers us a worldview that is unshakeable in its humanity.


Paul Guest’s first book, THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY AND THE RUIN OF THE WORLD, won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry, and his second book, NOTES FOR MY BODY DOUBLE, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. In 2010 Ecco will publish his memoir, One More Theory About Happiness. The recipient of a 2007 Whiting Award, he is a visiting professor of English at the University of West Georgia.


Marketing Campaign

National Radio Interviews, Including NPR • National Print Campaign, Features, and Reviews • Online Outreach to poetry websites and blogs, including CruelestMonth.com

Ander Monson interview

Undergraduate English Conference

12:30 pm

12:30 Paul Guest Creative Non-Fiction Panel

Chair: Ben Brown

Caroline Morris – Thank You For Choosing Martin's How May I Help You

Phillip Evans – The Six Fifty-Fivers

Jeffrey Peterson – Untitled

David Langley – Perhaps It was Coffee Cake, as it was Very Bitter

12:30 The End (Mis) Interpreted: Morality, Community, and the Literary Apocalypse

Chair: Amelia Lewis

Marquita Elder – "Go on my Son": The Diasporic Apocalypse and the Creation of Community in Zadie Smith's White Teeth

David Ellis – Death, Absurd Revolt, and Violence: Apocalyptic Elements in Cat's Cradle and The Plague and the Revelation of Communal Violence

Samatha Fowler – The Problematic Glorification of Science in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

12:30 Dr. Hipchen's Creative Non-Fiction: Shorter Works

Chair: April Oglesbee

Ashley Burne – Playing the Role

Mary Kay McBrayer – Untitled

Brandy Nickels – Turkey Neck Bend

Savannah Smith – Bipolar Bear Cub

12:30 Constructing Culture: Language and the (Re)Creation of our Self-hood and Surroundings

Chair: Heather King

Stephanie Kuzy – India Mania: A Representation of Fashion in Modern American Women

Jennifer Rivers – Cutting Speech: Castrating Tom Buchanan with Spoken Language in The Great Gatsby

Stephanie Shon – TAG Body Spray: Irresistible, or is It?

Kaleigh Tharpe – Comfortably Convenient: The Vans' Checkerboard Slip-on in Contemporary American Culture

12:30 In the Margins: Coolness and the Academy

Chair: Deb Brons

Aaron Robertson – Man or Shade: Sanctioning the Body in Dante's Inferno

Brittany Presley – Left-Handedness as a Socially Constructed Freakery

Matt Sherling – Becoming Jack, not Tyler

Denise Slavinski -- 19th Centruy Play-Doh: Resisting and Restructuring the Marriage Plot

12:30 Philosophy of Religion

Chair: Josh Grant

Timothy Wright – The Sacred Whore

Shelley Donaldson – A Reformed View of Natural Theology

Phil Brewer – Waking Ned Divine

12:30 First Year Writing: Poetry

Chair: Amy Ellison

Elaine Pham – The Struggle for Internal Peace

Victor Bailey – Emotional Masquerade

Michelle Wolfgang – Truth of Nature

12:30 First Year Writing Misc Panel

Chair: Jessica Wise

Emily Denaris – Control of Fate

Leslie Mack – The Answer my Friend: Implications of Dust in Where is Waldo? "Gold Rush" Illustration

Stephanie Martin – In Mold and War: The Sculpting of Life after Trauma in Jonathan Saffron Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jordan Weathers – Gender and Sexuality in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds

2:00 pm

2:00 Dr. Davidson Not Yet Titled Panel

Chair: Jesse Bishop

Jessica McMillian – The "Fair Street" and "Livid Marsh": The Punitive and Protective Rivers of Dante's Inferno

Samantha Godwin – The Heroic Beggar: Breaking Heroic Archetypes in Homer's The Odyssey

Sumner Gann – Possessed by the Spirit: The Body as Archive in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Rich Collins – Effeminate Deferral: The Fears of Greek Patriarchy in The Odyssey

2:00 Dr. Hipchen's Creative Non-Fiction: The Longer Works

Chair: April Oglesbee

Kendall Pope – "Chicky the Coward"

Kate Peterson – "Women's Issues"

2:00 Race, Place and the Geography of Identity in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction

Chair: Deb Brons

Melissa King – "Through His Own Reflections": Understanding Grace Through Excremental Images in Flannery O' Connor's "The Artifical Nigger"

Ashley Maddox – Converging Too Late in Flannery O'Connor's "Greenleaf"

Pauline Rodwell – Divide and Conquer: Dueling Psyches in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

2:00 First Year Writing: Shared Texts

Chair: Jessica Wise

Amanda Shoemake – Character Identity

Michael Obermeyer – The Healing Prowess of Nature in Ron Rash's The World Made Straight

Chabrina Derrico – I Don’t' Want to be Just Like Daddy

Jared Johnson –

2:00 Creative Writing: Poetry

Chair: Amy Ellison

Melissa Stubbs – Selected Poems

Brittany Presley – Selected Poems

Ari Siesser – Treatment of Societal Norms in Greg Fraser's Poetry

2:00 Dr. Brickman's Film as Literature

Chair: Amelia Lewis

Caroline Morris – The South's Gonna Do it Again: Southern Gothicism in Black Snake Moan

Megan Payne – I Know You Are But What Am I: The Monstrous Sexual Sameness of Frank and Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Larry Peel – Faithful

Inger Harber – Over the Shoulder: How Hitchcock got Around Censorship

2:00 Philosophy of Existentialism

Chair: Josh Grant

Timothy Wright – A Consciousness of Being Perfectly at One

Anna Potter – The Whole Nine Yards; or, How I Stopped Worrying and Loved to Learn the Existentialists

Phil Brewer – Unmasking the Underground Man

2:00 Pastoral Revisions in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Chair: Ben Brown

Natalie Hebert -- Nature versus Civilization in Gaining a Sense of Self

Initia Van Tonder -- Thomas Sutpen: Humanity's Inversion of Nature

Jane Drammeh -- Sins of our Fathers in Absalom, Absalom!

Lisa Cunningham -- Narrative Unreliability in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

3:30 pm

3:30 First Year Writing: Poetry

Chair: Amy Ellison

Melanie Brooks – What is Sexy?

Cameron Smith – The Transformation of Figurative Art to Images for the Reader

Brian Crews – A Real Poet: The Disassembly of Signification in Frank O' Hara's "Why I Am Not A Painter"

3:30 Not Yet Titled Panel

Chair: Jessica Wise

Laura Fletcher – Intersectionality in Black Women's Autobiography: Mary Church Terrell

Savannah Smith – A Handmaid in the Hot Seat: The Novel's Pensive Prisioner vs. the Film's Heavy Petting Protestor

Megan Payne – Do I Know You?: Relationships and Grotesque Modernism in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Brandy Nickels – Beyond the Façade: The Role of Beauty in Veronica

3:30 English Witch Plays: Supernatural Women and How to Handle Them

Chair: April Oglesbee

Lisa Cunningham – to be determined

Shelley Decker – The Portrayal of Midwives in The Witch and MacBeth

Lisa Cunningham – to be determined

3:30 Creative Fiction

Chair: Ben Brown

Jessica Barrett – "Reason for Living"

Mary Kay McBrayer – "Question Marks"

Laura Parkhouse – "Contraceptives"

John Underwood – "Blacktop Buckner"

3:30 Not yet named

Chair: Jesse Bishop

Jimmy Worthy – An Identity's Evolution

Kendra Parker – This Hazardous Business of Passing

Jeanelle Turner – Father Abandonment

Danielle Davidson – Soul Colors: James Weldon Johnson's Ex- Colored Man and the Guilty Pleasure of Culture

3:30 The Inter-textuality of Philosophy and Ethics

Chair: Josh Grant

Jeffrey Peterson – A Hatred of Hegemony in First Indian on the Moon

Charles Bauch – Virtue Ethics and Capitalist Power

Jennifer Ly -- Sherman Alexie's Paean

3:30 Comedic Representations of Satan in American Literature and Contemporary Culture

Chair: James Phillips

Bill Chesser – Trouble in the Garden of Good and Evil

Pam Murphy – Constructing Eden: Morals and Motive in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village

Stephanie Urich – The Many Faces of Evil: Exploring Concepts of Good and Evil in Constantine and Dogma

ENG 3200
Intro to Creative Writing
Spring 2008
Paul Guest


Write a love poem to an inanimate object: your skateboard, iPhone, a banana nut muffin, old pajamas, pillows, a bathtub, etc.

25 lines minimum.

Due: Feb. 26th. Bring copies for everyone. Read the excerpt of "Jubilate Agno" by Christopher Smart.

Syllabus

ENGL 3200

SPRING 2008

INTRO CREATIVE WRITING

Paul Guest

TLC 1113B

Office Hours:

M/W/F: 9-10 a.m. and by appointment

Course Description:

3200 is an introductory level course in the writing of Poetry and Fiction. This course is designed to make you better readers of poetry and fiction, as well as competent writers in both genres. In this class we will discuss poetry and fiction writing, and use assigned materials as well as in-class exercises to discuss the basic problems (and solutions) in writing poetry and fiction. These discussions and in-class exercises are for your benefit, and might lead to stories and poems that you never expected. Creative writing involves dedication, imagination, and hard-work. No matter what your “skill” level entering this course, you will do well if you put in obvious effort and keep an open mind.

My assumption in teaching this course is that each of you takes your writing seriously, and that you would like to be treated as artists-in-the-making. I expect for you to be dedicated to what you are doing and to yourselves. I will trust you to read & keep up with coursework. If I do not feel that trust is deserved, I will quiz you on material & the like.

Course Goals:

· Students will learn to write in the genres of poetry and short fiction and become conversant with issues of technique in both disciplines.

· Students will develop an understanding of the defining characteristics of both genres

· Students will become more adept readers and writers as they consider model texts from a writer’s perspective

· Students will learn to offer and receive constructive criticism in a public forum.

Course Texts:

Chang, Victoria. Circle

Bell, Josh. No Planet Strike (out-of-print)

Monson, Ander. Other Electricities

Grade Breakdown:

20% -- Participation (includes participation in discussions, workshops, weekly responses, in-class writing,

and take-home assignments, as well as your Journal)

30% -- Short Critical Papers (15% poetry Exam, 15% Fiction Exam)

50% -- Portfolios (25% Poetry; 25% Fiction)

On the “micro” level – poems and short stories are graded on a “check system” as you write them. Checks should serve as progress markers, and do not “equal” grades in that checks are not static like grades: you have a chance to improve your checks with each revision. Only checks on final, portfolio drafts translate into exact points:

Minus: Technically incomplete (did not meet requirements of assignment)

CheckMinus: Technically complete, but minimally so: clearly undeveloped

Check: Meets requirements of assignment, shows understanding of basic W103 concepts

CheckPlus: Well developed, successful execution on multiple levels, effort is obvious

Plus: Superior; usually reserved for revisions

Student Writing:

First and Foremost: Late work of ANY KIND will not be accepted. If you are having a problem completing an assignment, notify me well in advance of the due date. I may or may not grant you an extension.

Everything you turn in as a formal assignment MUST be typewritten in a standard font. If your story or poem is being critiqued, you are responsible for making copies for all of your classmates. When the stories and poems are received, they should be read well in advance of class. You should come to class with your copy of the student work marked up (critiqued), ready to provide helpful commentary for the writer.

Participation:

The success of this course depends on your participation. Take an active role in your artistic development. Class participation in discussions and in workshop is very, very important. A portion of your grade will be based on this participation. Try to make at least one insightful comment per class.

Conferences:

My office hours are for your benefit. I will have mid-semester conferences with each of you. At any other time, you are welcome to set up a conference to discuss any questions or concerns you might have about your writing.

Final Portfolio:

At the end of the semester you will turn in a portfolio comprising all drafts of your stories and poems. You should also keep in-class excercises in a folder for me to look at, as well as copies of your critiques. It is VERY IMPORTANT that you have ALL drafts of your work in this protfolio, as it will help me monitor your effort and improvement (which are the basis of this class & progress as a writer). Effort and improvement count more than perfection.

Workshopping:

We will critique everyone’s writing at some point during the semester. When making suggestions or critiques, remember that the comments should be helpful. Remember that you are making your classmates into stronger writers, not advancing your career as a colorful critic. I would never want you to hold back any sincere criticism that you wish to make. We cannot have a class if everyone is too shy or overly cautious in their comments. But remember your purpose in making any critiques: to lend help to your classmates. And don’t be afraid to emphasize what you LIKE about someone’s work as well.

Poem 1

SPRING 2008
ENGL 3200
Professor Paul Guest
Poem #1

In Victoria Chang's collection of poems, Circle, ideas of gender and culture and mythology/history are addressed, usually, more indirectly than explicitly. The voice of the speaker in her poems often seems like, or obviously is, someone different than the author. For your first poem, choose a persona different than yourself. Model your poems on Chang's but don't be afraid to have fun.

Due: next Tuesday. At least 20 lines long. Unrhymed couplets.

Bring 1 copy for everyone, including me.