Poetics Syllabus
Fall, 1994

_THE ORDINARY_
 
English 583
Thursday 12:30pm 438 Clemens Hall
Charles Bernstein
 
 
Between Walls
 
the back wings
of the
 
hospital where
nothing
 
will grow lie
cinders
 
in which shine
the broken
 
pieces of a green
bottle
          ~ W C Williams
**
Key: *TL=required at Talking Leaves; L=Lockwood Reserve (3-day)
      X=xerox packet/handout; PR=Poetry Room
      
#2 (September 8) Some preliminaries
all xeroxes:
Raymond Williams, "Culture Is Ordinary" (X)
"The Poetics of Everyday Life", Poetics Journal (X)
Stanley Cavell (X)
Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech"
Henri Lefebvre, "The Everyday and Everydayness"
Agnes Heller, from Everyday Life (X,L) (BD 431 H39713 1984)
Michael Harr, "The Enigma of Everydayness" (X) 
Laurie Langbauer, "Cultural Studies and the Politics of the
Everyday" (X)
*
Sigmund Freud, The psychopathology of everyday life, tr. James
Strachey (*TL,L) (BF173 .F82 1989)            
 
cf:
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, etc.
E. P. Thompson, The Long Revolution, etc.
Philippe Aries, et al, A History of Private Life
Ferdinand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life 
Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
 
#3 (September 22) John Taggart visit
Taggart, Two essays on Zukofsky (X)
Zukofsky, "Songs of Degrees", "To my washstand" &c (X)
Taggart, Loop (*TL,PR)
see also Taggart's earlier books, esp. The pyramid is a pure
crystal (L) (PS3570.A32 P9)
& others in PR!
Also rec: Remaining in Light: Ant Meditations on a Painting by
Edward Hopper  (TL, L) (ND237.H75 A78 1993)         
***
W C Williams, "between walls", "this is just to say" "red
wheelbarrow" etc: vol 1 of Collected to start
Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (X)
 
 
#4 (September 29) Andrew Benjamin visit
Lecture:  "Celan and s: The Poetry of Hope"
The libraries have dozens of items by s; pick one.
Celan: "Everything's Different" (X)
Celan, tr. Michael Hamburger (*@L) (PT2605.E4 A25 1988)         
Recommended: books by Andrew Benjamin on reserve at L:
The Plural Event: Descartes, Hegel, Heideggar 
Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words.
 
#5 (October 6) Robert Grenier visit
Talk: "Larry Eigner and the Task of American Letters"
Grenier, A Day at the Beach (*TL, PR)
         What I Believe Transpiration Transpiring Minn. (*PR)
         strongly rec: Attention (TL,PR), Phantom Anthems(TL,PR)  
         & other Grenier titles at PR
Eigner, Windows/Walls/Yard/Ways (*TL,PR)
        Areas  Lights  Heights (*TL,PR) (part. "Approaching
Things", "The Bible Told Me So")
        Recommended: many other Eigner titles at PR   
*
Robert Creeley, "Some Senses of the Commonplace" (X); cf;
Collected Poems, the Grenier/Scribner's Selected Poems
 
#6 (October 13) Michael Davidson visit
Talk: "Palimtexts: Modernity and Material Culture"
Davidson, Post Hoc (*TL,L) (PS3554.A835 P6 1990)      
Davidson, Your Average Youth (X)
Davidson, essays (X)
Recommended:  The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and
Community at Mid-Century (L) (PS285.S3 D38 1989)
Other books by Davidson in the PR
*
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (TL)
 
#7 (October 20) 
Critique of Everyday Life: I (continues Nov. 3)
Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol 1 *TL,L) (BD 431
L36513 1991 v.1)  isbn 0-86091-587-5
De Certeau, Ars de Fair (X)
 
recommended:
Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (CB427 .L413 1971)
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory
Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
Marx, Capital, vol 1; Early Writings
The best general introduction to Western Marxism is Perry
Anderson's Concerning Western Marxism and In the Tracks of
Historical Materialism; see also Jameson's Marxism and Form
 
#8 (October 27) Stephen Fredman
Lecture
     "Falling Between Two Stools: Charles Reznikoff and Jewish
American Modernism  
Reznikoff, Collected Poems (*@TL,L) (PS3535.E98 A17 1976)
Bernstein, "Reznikoff's Nearness" (X)
Recommended:
Reznikoff, Testimony (L)  (PS3535.E98 T425 1978)       
           Family Chronicle (PR)
The Menorah Journal, ed. Leo Schwartz, JPS, 1994 (DS113 .M425)
Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the
Emersonian Tradition (L)
         Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (L)
 
#9 (November 3)
Critique of Everyday Life: II 
DeBord, Society of the Spectacle (*TL,L) (TEMPORARY CONTROL
NUMBER: EBM8506)
Vaneigem, from The Revolution of Everyday Life (X)
Recommended: Debord, Comments on the society of the spectacle 
(HM291 .D38813 1990)         
 
#10 (November 10)
Ordinary Language Philosophy
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (*TL,L) (B3376.W563
P53 1968)
Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (X,L) (PS217.P45 C38 1988)
J. L. Austin (X)
 
#11 (November 17)
Art/Everyday Life/Display
Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Tr. Ron Padgett
(*TL,L) (ND553.D774 C313 1971)       
Rogielo Lopez Cuenca, slides / essay by C.B. (X)
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlett, "Objects of Ethnography" (X)
David Antin, "real estate" (X)
John Cage, "Silence" (X)
"Painting by Number" from The Nation (X)
"60 Minutes" (X)
 
Cf:
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: The Lyric Poet in the Age of
High Capitalism
Kurt Schwitters, PPPP: Selected Writings, etc.
Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life 
Hannah Wilke, last photos
 
#12 (December 1)  Ben Yarmolinsky visit
X: The Subject, Anita excepts, "Miranda"
Virgil Thomson, Music with Words: A Composer's View (X,L) 
(ML 410 T452A16 1989)
Bernstein, "Emotions of Normal People" "Word Frequencies" (X)
*
read ahead for 13 &14!
 
#13 (December 8) /#14 (TUESDAY December 13/Last Class)
Poetry and Poetics of the Everyday Life
Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (*TL,PR)
Hannah Weiner, Clairvoyant Journal (*TL,PR)
Nick Piombino, Boundary of Blur (*TL,PR); "stet" (X)
Norman Fischer, Precisely the Point Being Made (*TL,PR)
Ron Silliman, Bart (*TL)
Ted Greenwald, Common Sense (*TL), see also Makes Sense (PR)
James Schulyer, "The Morning of the Poem" in same (L)
cf:
Lyn Hejinian, The Cell
Leslie Scalapino, way
Ted Berrigan, A Certain Slant of Light
Frank O'Hara, Collected Poems
Michel Leiris, Manhood
Lydia Davis, Break It Down
etc.!!
 
#14
English Verse and the Everyday (as time permits)
Blake, Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience
Wordsworth, "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads"
John Skelton (X)
William Barnes (X)
Oliver Goldsmith, "Deserted Village" (X)
Gray's "Elegy"
Henry Weinfeld, The Poet without a Name: Gray's Elegy and the
Problem of History
 
 
#15 (Some Other Time)
Sociology of Everyday Life
Goffman, Frame Analysis, Forms of Talk, &c
Bourdieu, Distinction