Course Offering, Spring 2008 

One Credit,  offered for graduate YSU credit and elective NEOMFA credit

Presenting Poems and Stories in Public

Penguin Review Office

Friday, March 21, and Saturday, March 22, 9-4. 

Philip Brady

Aims: This one-credit course will introduce you to poetry and fiction as oral arts. Our aim is to strengthen your poetic ear, and to hone your skills in the art of presenting readings to audiences, and hearing and understanding the spoken word as art. We will make, record, and critique oral presentations, discuss the do's-and-don'ts of reading aloud, and view and critique films of readings. We will touch on the political, cultural, aesthetic, and psychological aspects of taking poems and stories off the page. We will also introduce sources of literary poetry as orature in prime cultures, and we will trace ways in which the oral tradition survives today in children's verse, anecdote, joke, and ritual speech. We will consider how the oral tradition shaped and continues to shape poetic forms. We will attempt to stimulate and nurture our aural imagination. Drawing on studies in ethnopoetics, we will explore the tension and interplay between literary and oral arts, considering the impact of education, technology, and modernity on the place of poetry in our lives. 

Requirements: Students will be graded on oral presentations made in class. Readings will come from a course packet prepared specially for this one-credit course, including essays by some of the leading figures in the ethnopoetic movement.

For more information, contact Dr. Philip Brady at psbrady@gmail.com, or 330-941-1952.

Philip Brady directs the YSU Poetry Center and Etruscan Press. He is the author of three books of poems and a memoir. His next book, forthcoming in 2008 from the University of Tennessee, is By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt Bard, a collection of twenty personal essays offering new approaches toward listening to the world through the agency of poetry