Commentary: On commentary

Julia Bloch

2011 road trip to the Bard MAT program, during which I first wrote the syllabus — On my 2011 road trip from Philadelphia to the Bard MAT program in California, during which I first wrote the syllabus for the Williams course.

In summer 2012, I’ll be writing a series of short commentaries devoted to my course Literature 512: William Carlos Williams, a graduate seminar in the Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching program. Students on the literature track in the MAT program are asked to take at least one course devoted to a “major author,” and I chose Williams because of the very way his work questions the notion of major and minor literature, the singularity of the individual author, and the relevance of the “major author” for twentieth-century poetics. The title of this series comes from Williams’s essay “Against the Weather: A Study of the Artist.”

Stay tuned.

June 20, 2012

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“There are no sagas — only trees now, animals, engines: There’s that.”
— William Carlos Williams, The Descent of Winter

In 2012, I’m writing a series of commentaries devoted to my course Literature 512: William Carlos Williams, at the Bard College MAT program in Delano, California. I’ll be writing about teaching poetry within a teacher training program, and about canonization, marginality, form, ideology, and American language.

Photo by Arielle Brousse.

Julia Bloch is an editor at Jacket2 and an assistant professor of literature in the Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching program. She is the author of Letters to Kelly Clarkson and lives in Southern California.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.