Blogging for English 242A

You can create a new post by clicking on "new post" in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, or by clicking "new post" under Techniques of Poetry in your blogger.com dashboard. Posting your posts as posts, rather than as comments, is really better--because then people can comment on your posts!


The blog is a curious, hybrid form--somewhere between private journaling and public journalism--so it’s fitting that in this course it fulfills a couple of different functions. To a certain extent, you can treat the course blog as a kind of writing journal--a place where you make note of ideas, images, sounds, and notions that are exerting influence on your creative life, where you articulate questions you hope to write through, where early drafts of your poems first coalesce. At the same time, though, this blog is a shared space, one in which you place your ideas in dialogue with your peers’. It’s a space where you can do a kind of thinking “aloud”--where you can collaborate, brainstorm, debate, support and challenge one another. It’s an informal extension of the classroom discussion space, and a jumping-off point from which you (individually or as a group) can also get involved in the larger literary debates bouncing around the poetry blogosphere. Printing out your and others’ recent contributions to the blog and bringing them to class with you may also help you organize your thoughts and participate more meaningfully in our discussions.

Each week, please contribute 200 words to the class blog before class time on Tuesday--unless otherwise directed. For example, this week I’d like you to contribute 450 words. This week I’m asking you some questions to get your blogging started, but usually you’ll be free to write about whatever you’d like (as long as it’s related to class discussion, to your outside reading about poetic discussions, or to your creative writing life). Responding to your classmates’ posts can be a great way to avoid writer’s block and to keep the conversation rolling!

Please remember that the blog is a public forum. Don’t write anything here you’re not okay with your professors, your grandma, and your future employers reading. Broaching touchy, tense, or vexed topics is okay and even encouraged--and feel free to be completely honest--but remember to do so with respect.