Regarding the Book Issue

Since Monday's class was more or less brought to a halt due to only about a third of you having a copy of The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (and therefore, I'm lead to presume, only about a third of you actually having done the reading), I wanted to address the issue of books.

Admittedly, this course might require a few more books than other sections of Topics in Literature that are being offered this quarter, and thought most of the books are rather reasonably priced, a few (the Ashbery and Koch in particular) might be a little more expensive than most, provided that you buy them new, and not through a site like Amazon where you'll get a significant discount (as well as free shipping). That having been said, if you check the booklist, you'll find many links to sites where you can find cheap used copies of the required texts for this course. Had you checked out ABE Books, for example, in advance of this week's classes, you'd have found 26 copies of The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch on sale for less than $10. If you search for similar deals for the rest of the books we'll be reading this quarter, I'm sure you'll find similar values. One bookseller alone has more than forty copies of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan available for approximately $13 (more than 20 copies at $9.95 with $3.50 shipping, and more than 20 copies at $12.95 with free shipping).

If you want to share copies of the books, that's fine, but you might run into some problems during the midterm, since you can't pass it back and forth. Perhaps you can photocopy the required reading so each of you can have a copy. If you're getting the poems off of the internet, there are certain things you should be wary of (such as omissions, typos, inconsistent formatting in regards to line and stanza breaks, or just plain incorrect versions of the poems), but if they're coming from a reputable source, at the very least print them out so you can annotate them and bring them to class. Of course, you're not likely to be able to find all of the required readings, and those gaps might prove costly if the poem you missed happens to come up on a quiz. Also, please don't forget that libraries still exist, and you can make use of WorldCat to look up what local libraries carry the books you need.

Beyond taking part in our class discussions or making use of the blog, the most rudimentary form of class participation is actually having the texts and doing the reading. If you're not doing that bare minimum, then your chances of doing well in this class are severely diminished. I was disappointed with how Monday's class went — thought still grateful to those students who did the reading and were able to talk about it — and sincerely hope that we won't have any more classes with energy and participation as low as that for the rest of the quarter.