English 88 - modern & contemporary American poetry

Al Filreis
Fall 2012

introduction

Thursday, September 6 - introductory class

1. look at the list of 88 staffers and office hours: link
2. read a summary of position papers for this course: link
3. have a long look at PennSound: link to site
4. have a long look at the Kelly Writers House fall events calendar: link
5. have a look at your instructor's homepage: link to site
6. have a look at PoemTalk: link
7. have a look at your instructor's commentary page at Jacket2: link
8. listen to Filreis talk (5 mins.) about the decline of Victorian poetry: link to audio
9. read excerpts from Edwin Markham's "Lincoln, the Man of the People": link to text
10. read Catherine French's "The Alphabet": link to text
11. read John Yau's "830 Fireplace Road": link to text
12. watch/listen to Laurie Anderson's "From the Air": link to YouTube

chapter 1: two proto-modernists

In chapter 1, we'll encounter two 19th-century American poets whose very different approaches to verse were equally challenging to official verse culture of the time. As a matter of form (but also of content!) Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were radicals. What sort of radicalism is this? In a way, this course is all about exploring expressions of that radicalism from Whitman and Dickinson to the present day. Such challenges to official verse culture (and, often, American culture at large) present us with a lineage of ideas about art and expression, a tradition that can be outlined, mostly followed, somewhat traced. In this course we follow, to the best of our ability - and given the limits of time - that tradition, and try to make overall sense of it. You will find that we do this one poem at a time. We will explore Dickinson first, Whitman second, and then begin to sketch out the major differences between them, which, some say, amount to two opposite ends of the spectrum of poetic experimentalism and dissent in the 19th century. Which is to say: on the spectrum of traditional-to-experimental poetry, they are on the same end (experimental); on the spectrum of experimentalism, their approaches can put them on opposite ends. In short, they offer us alternative poetic radicalisms, and their influences down the line (which we will explore next) are both powerful but largely distinct. One question you'll be prepared to ask by the end of the course: is the Dickinsonian tradition more ascendent and apt in today's experimental poetry, or the Whitmanian?

Tuesday, September 11 - Emily Dickinson

1. read Dickinson's "I dwell in Possibility": link to text
1A. listen to Al Filreis recite "I dwell in Possibility": link to audio
2. read Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed": link to text
3. read Dickinson's "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant": link to text
4. read Dickinson's "The Brain, within its Groove": link to text
5. read a definition of ballad meter: link
6. read "I taste a liquor never brewed" as edited by Oscar Williams: link to text
7. listen to a 25-min. discussion on Susan Howe's version of Emily Dickinson: link to PoemTalk

Thursday, September 13 - Walt Whitman

1. read Whitman's Song of Myself cantos 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 47, 52: link to text
1A. listen to Al Filreis reading excerpts from "Song of Myself": link to audio
2. read Whitman's "The Sleepers": link to text
3. read about repetition: link

Tuesday, September 18 - some Whitmanians

In the second half of chapter 1, we will read the work of three poets working in the Whitmanian mode and three poets writing in the Dickinsonian mode. We will encounter our Whitmanians, William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, again later in the course - Williams as a modernist and Ginsberg as a "beat" poet. The Whitman/Williams/Ginsberg connection is a strong one; Ginsberg wrote directly in response to both Whitman and Williams and saw the lineage as crucial to the development of his approach. Our Dickinsonians are more disparate in their response to Dickinson's writing. Of the three - Lorine Niedecker, Cid Corman, and Rae Armantrout - only the last could be said really to be a direct poetic descendent of Emily Dickinson's aesthetic.

1. read William Carlos Williams's "Danse Russe": link to text
2A. listen to Williams perform "Danse Russe": link to PennSound
2B. read/listen to "Danse Russe" in text-audio alignment: link
3. read Williams's "Smell!": link to text
4A. listen to Williams perform "Smell!": link to PennSound
4B. read/listen to "Smell!" as text-audio alignment: link to PennSound
5. read Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California": link to text
6. listen to Ginsberg perform "A Supermarket in California": link to PennSound
7. read Williams's "Catholic Bells": link to text
8. listen to Williams perform "Catholic Bells": link to PennSound
9. read Ginsberg's "America": link to text
10. listen to Ginsberg perform "America": link to PennSound
11. listen to Ginsberg's drunken reading of "America" in 1956: link to audio
12. read the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen's "Land of Hope and Dreams": link to text
13. watch/listen to Bruce Springsteen perform "Land of Hope and Dreams": link to YouTube

Thursday, September 20 - some Dickinsonians

1. read Lorine Niedecker's "Grandfather advised me": link to text
2. read Niedecker's "You are my friend": link to text
3. read Cid Corman's "It isnt for want": link to text
3. listen to Corman perform "It isnt for want": link to PennSound
4. read Corman's "Enuresis": link to text
5. listen to Corman perform "Enuresis": link to PennSound
6. listen to a 25-min. discussion of "Enuresis": link to PoemTalk
7. read Rae Armantrout's "The Way": link to text
8. listen to Armantrout perform "The Way": link to PennSound
9. listen to a 25-min. discussion of "The Way": link to PoemTalk

PAPER OPTION #1: How is the Dickinsonian or "intensive" modern poetic practice, as found specifically in the Dickinson poems we've read, furthered or supported by the poem by Rae Armantrout on the reading list ("The Way") and by the comments Armantrout made - and poems she read - when she presented her own poems "through" Dickinson's at the Writers House in October 2000. The question behind this paper can be summed up this way: what's so "Dickinsonian" about Armantrout?

Thursday, September 20 - 9 pm - special session - Whitmanians vs. Dickinsonians

chapter 2: modernism

Tuesday, September 25 - imagism

Modernism in poetry had many beginnings; imagism marks just one. But in a fast introduction, this brief but influential movement gives us a good place to start. Imagists had no use for late Victorian wordiness, flowery figuration and "beautiful" abstraction and they rejected such qualities through staunch assertions demanding concision, concentration, precise visuality and a sort of super-focused emotive objectivity. In the first of four parts of chapter 2, we will ask ourselves whether each poem meets the impossible or nearly impossible standards set out by imagist manifestos. If any given poem "fails" to meet such standards, it is by no means a sign of "bad poetry." But one way to learn about the rise of poetic modernism is to make discernments based on the poets' own (momentary) programmatic demands.

1. listen to brief introduction to imagism: link to audio
2. read a brief definition of imagism & the imagist manifesto: link
3. read H.D.'s "Sea Rose": link to text
4. read H.D.'s "Oread": link to text
5. read H.D.'s "Sea Poppies": link to text
6. read Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro": link to text
7. read Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" as it originally appeared in Poetry magazine: link to text
8. read William Carlos Williams's "Between Walls": link to text
9A. listen to Williams perform "Between Walls": link to PennSound
9B. read/listen with text-audio alignment to Williams's "Between Walls": link to PennSound
10. listen to a 25-min. discussion of "Between Walls": link to PoemTalk
11. read two pages from Ernest Hemingway's early prose: link to text
12. read Ezra Pound's "The Encounter": link to text
13. read William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow": link to text
14A. listen to four performances by Williams of "The Red Wheelbarrow": link to audio
14B. listen to five performances by Williams of "The Red Wheelbarrow" as text-audio alignment: link to PennSound

PAPER OPTION #2: What does the wording (the arrangement of the words) in H.D.'s "Sea Rose" and "Oread" have to do with the wording of Ernest Hemingway's early prose (in the sample we are reading)? There is not much connection between H.D. and Hemingway, but if you write this essay you are writing about a way in which their writing - their way of arranging words - is similar.

Thursday, September 27 - Williams

Now in the second of four parts of our chapter on the rise of modernism, we take a closer look at William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). We met Williams as a "Whitmanian" in chapter 1, the middle figure in a poetic line running from Whitman to Ginsberg. But that focus on him was a little misleading. The Williams of the late 1910s and 1920s was a poet fascinated by currents of formal experimentation - imagism, yes, but also dadaism, cubism (especially drawing on innovations and painting) and, a little later, objectivism. It's not the purpose of this course that we learn what all these -isms mean. Rather, let's start with a few poems by Williams that befit the imagist moment, and go from there. Quickly we'll find that Williams (always aesthetically restless) was interested in a writing that might capture the dynamism of its modern subject matter and was (mostly) willing to face problems created by traditional approaches to description and portraiture. When these conventions seemed to him to fail, he was prepared to include such failure in the poem itself - disclosing the troubled process of representation.

1. read two brief biographical profiles of Williams: links 1, 2
2. read Williams's "Lines": link to text
3. read Williams's comment on poems as word-machines: link to text
4. read Williams's "By the road to the contagious hospital" from Spring and All: link
5. listen to Williams perform "By the road to the contagious hospital": link to PennSound
6. read Williams's "The rose is obsolete" from Spring and All: link to text
7. listen to Filreis talk about Williams's "The rose is obsolete" (6 mins.): link to audio
8. read Williams's "This Is Just to Say": link to text
9. listen to five of Williams's performances of "This Is Just to Say": link to audio
10. listen to Williams discuss "This Is Just to Say" and Flossie's response: link to audio
11. read Flossie Williams's reply to "This Is Just to Say": link to text
12. watch a museum-goer's video of Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" at SFMOMA: link to YouTube
13. look at photograph of Duchamp's "Fountain": link to photo
14. read two versions Williams's poem called "Young Woman at a Window": versions 1 & 2
15. read Williams's "Portait of a Lady": link to text
16. listen to three recordings of Williams reading "Portrait of a Lady": 1, 2, 3
17. look closely at Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Desecnding a Staircase": link

PAPER OPTION #3: Williams's "This Is Just to Say" was written "for" and/or "to" Williams's wife Flossie; in a sense, it's "just" a household message, saying: "Sorry, I took the plums you were going to eat." Read the "Note to 'This Is Just to Say'" and be sure you understand how and why Flossie made her rejoinder to her husband in the form of her own writing. Being sure to bring in your judgment as to the overall success or failure of imagism generally, write an essay taking one of the following positions: (a) William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say" is manifestly poetic, whereas Flossie Williams's "Reply" obviously is unpoetic or non-poetic, or (b) Williams's "This Is Just to Say" is no more of a poem than Flossie's reply.

PAPER OPTION #4: You are reading two distinct versions of Williams's poem "Young Woman at a Window." I realize that you needn't specifically prefer one over the other, but for this paper I am asking you to do so unequivocally. Which do you prefer and why? On what basis (formalist, ethical, political, structural [I realize these are overlapping categories]) do you make your preference?

Tuesday, October 2 - Stein

Gertrude Stein's contribution to modernist poetry and poetics cannot be overstated, so now, in the third section of chapter 2 we turn to her, spending this day on a selection of her supposedly "difficult" writings. The difficulty of deriving any sort of conventional semantic meaning from the short prose-poems that comprise Tender Buttons turns out to be, for many readers, a helpful inducement to read for other kinds of signifying. As we hope you'll see from our class discussions, such difficulty need not excuse us from close reading. Stein's poems really can be interpreted. They might eschew representation, but by no means do they turn away from reference. The hard work you do in this part of chapter 2 will be amply rewarded when we get to chapter 9; Stein is a particular influence on John Ashbery in chapter 8, but she is an important influence on nearly every poet we'll read in chapter 9. As a matter of fact, here in chapter 2 we have a chance to listen to Jackson Mac Low (a chapter 9 poet) talk about why he finds Stein's opaque and difficult Tender Buttons so nonetheless meaningful. And we hear Joan Retallack (another chapter 9 poet) paying homage to Stein's "Composition as Explanation."

1. read Stein's "The Long Dress" from Tender Buttons: link to text [scroll down or control-F to search]
2. read Marjorie Perloff's comment on Stein and in particular on "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass": link to text
3. read Gertrude Stein, "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass," from the "Objects" section of Tender Buttons: link to text
4. listen to Jackson Mac Low's 1978 reading of Stein's "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass": link to PennSound
5. listen to Jackson Mac Low's commentary on Tender Buttons: link to PennSound
6. read Stein's "Water Raining" and "Malachite" from Tender Buttons: link to text [scroll down or search]
7. read Stein on narrative: link
8. read Stein on the noun: link
9. read Stein on loving repeating: link
10. read Stein on composition: link
11. listen to Joan Retallack reading some "propositions" from Stein's "Composition as Explanation": link to audio
12. read Stein's "Let Us Describe": link to text [scroll down]
13. read Stein's "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso" and Ulla Dydo's comment: link to text
14A. listen to Stein reading "If I Told Him": link to PennSound
14B. read/listen with text-audio alignment of Stein's "If I Told Him": link to PennSound
15. watch video of dance choreographed to Stein's "If I Told Him": link to YouTube
16. listen to Marjorie Perloff speaking about Stein's portraits: link to audio
17. read Stein's "A Very Valentine": link to text
18. read William Carlos Williams on Stein: link
19. read a brief introduction to Stein's Tender Buttons: link to text
20. read Stein's review of Alfred Kreymborg's Troubador: link to text
21. read Mark Van Doren's review Kreymborg's Troubador: link to text

PAPER OPTION #5: Write this paper only after reading very carefully all of the Gertrude Stein selections assigned for this day. Being sure to bring in your general judgment as to the success or failure of Stein's modernist use of language, take one of the following two positions: (a) Stein's experimental review of Alfred Kreymborg's book presents a more perceptive evaluation than does Van Doren's conventional review; (b) Van Doren's review, although stylistically conventional, is far and away the more perceptive of the two.

PAPER OPTION #6: Write an essay that is a close reading of "The Long Dress" by Stein. Be sure to account for every line. There is no authoritative interpretation of a poem such as those Stein wrote for Tender Buttons. Resist the temptation to over-interpret but do try to account for all the words here. Is there anything in this poem that is meta-poetic? What, if anything, do dresses have to do with writing? Note: We are aware that this paper is not a "position paper" like some of the others, although you should not shy from taking interpretive positions.

Thursday, October 4 - modernism at extremes

"The Baroness" (Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven) was way out there. But because she so intensely embodied modernist experimentalism, learning something about her life and writing is an apt way, in part, to end our brief introduction to poetic modernism roughly from 1912-1929. The three instances of modernist extremity we encounter in chapter 2.4 are very different expressions of "High Modernism." Well, the Baroness was certainly high on highballs when she wrote the poem of hers we'll read - or, rather, her language remarkably simulates a reeling discombulation, such that its critique of 1920s-style commercialism (not in itself unusual at the time) has a very sharp edge. She was "New York Dada" epitomized; Tristan Tzara's ideas about cutting up newspapers to form "personal" poems were, among his many other radical notions, crucial to the dadaist import. And John Peale Bishop? Well, as you'll see, he's another story altogether; his sonnet sets us up well for our approach to antimodernist doubts expressed by the poets of chapters 3, 4 and 5.

1. read about Alfred Jarry: link to text
2. read about Maxwell Bodenheim: link to text
3. listen to an brief biographical profile of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven: link to audio
4. listen to a reading from Kenneth Rexroth's recollection of the Baroness: link to audio
5. look at fashion images of "the Baroness look" in 2002: link
6. read William Carlos Williams's recollection of the Baroness from his autobiography: link to text
7. read jacket blurb by Filreis for Irene Gammel's biography of the Baroness: link
8. read Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven's "A Dozen Cocktails--Please": link to text
9. look at scholarly digital edition of "A Dozen Cocktails--Please" as edited by Tanya Clement: link to site
10. look at photograph of former 88'er dressed as the Baroness: link
11. read Baroness Elsa's poem "Ancestry": link to text
12. read Edna St. Vincent Millay's "First Fig": link to text [note: read only the first poem]
13. read Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Grown Up": link to text
14. read one of Edna St. Vincent Millay's many sonnets: link to text
15. read a definition of the sonnet: link
16. read John Peale Bishop's "A Recollection": link to text

chapter 3: antimodenist doubts - communist poets of the 1930s

The 1930s were of course years of economic crisis - the Depression. Like most other people, poets felt the urgency induced by privation, lack of opportunity, and desperation. But poets had all along been inclined toward social as well as aesthetic experimentalism; and they could write effectively, and so many felt they could be useful in the larger effort to find solutions - some modestly reformist, some extremer - to the nation's and the world's huge problems. When the Depression set in, many poets embraced radical critiques of the economic status quo and some joined revolutionary groups such as the Communist Party of the U.S. Such ideological journeys were often quite brief, and most once-Communist poets regretted it later, and said so. One of the myths created later is that all modernist poets repudiated modernism's embrace of opaqueness, indirection, and self-referentiality and began to write clearly and "transparently" so that masses of people could understand their language. This is not true; many pre-1930s modernists continued to write in experimental modes and remained committed to cubism, surrealism, dadaism, etc., and joined radical causes. But for our purposes here in this very brief chapter 3, we look at several poets whose poems, it might be said, bear radical content but deliver that content in traditional - one might say, conservative - forms. What can we make of this apparent contradiction or irony? What can we learn here about modernism's relation to political life? (Note that we also glance at two poets - Kenneth Fearing and Bob Brown - whose political radicalism did not entail giving up on formal experimentation. And then you'll see that our old friend Bill Williams is here too. In the mid-1930s WCW got involved with the political left and his poems contained more "social content" than usual.)

Tuesday, October 9

1. listen to Filreis on the transition from aesthetic high modernism to political radicalism in the poetry of the 1920s & '30s: link to audio (14 mins.)
2. read Edwin Rolfe's "Season of Death": link to text
3. read Genevieve Taggard's "Interior": link to text
4. read Ruth Lechlitner's "Lines for an Abortionist's Office": link to text
5. read Max Eastman's critical attack on Gertrude Stein: link to text
6. read William Carlos Williams's "Late for Summer Weather": link to text
7. read and listen to Carl Rakosi performing his poem "Oh Sestina": link
8. read Kenneth Fearing's "Green Light": link to text
8A. listen to Al Filreis read Fearing's "Green Light": link to audio
9. read David Greenhood's "Bread Winners": link to text
10. read one of Bob Brown's "Gems": link to text

Thursday, October 11 - special session on Robert Frost - noon at the Writers House

chapter 4: antimodernist doubts - the Harlem Renaissance

Our course is a limited survey and its selections are drastic - never more so than here in chapter 4. Although Harlem Renaissance writers such as Jean Toomer (in works like Cane) engaged a modernist sense of genre, we look at two poets whose sense of the relation between traditional stanza form and the content of racist hatred helps us understand the limits of formal experiment. Claude McKay's sense of the complicated inheritance of English prosody will come back to us at the very end of the course.

Thursday, October 11

1. read brief biography of Countee Cullen: link
2. read Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel": link to text
3. read Countee Cullen's "Incident": link to text
4. read Claude McKay's "If We Must Die": link to text
5. listen to McKay performing "If We Must Die": link to audio
6. read Melvin Tolson's review of McKay's "If We Must Die": link to text

PAPER OPTION #7: Consider Cullen's poem "Incident." Write a paper stating your position on the following question: Does Cullen's use of traditional poetic form diminish the power of the incident he describes in the poem? Explain your position. And be sure to describe the stanza form he uses.

PAPER OPTION #8: Consider Claude McKay's poem "If We Must Die." Write a paper stating your position on the following question: Does McKay's use of traditional poetic form diminish the power of the situation he describes in the poem and/or of the response he advocates? Explain your position. And be sure to describe the stanza form he uses.

chapter 5: antimodernist doubts - Robert Frost

We will not actually have a class session on chapter 5. But most of you will have attended the special session on "Mending Wall" held on October 11, and we ask that you read "Mending Wall" and listen to Frost performing the poem, and then that you watch a short film of me and some ex-88'ers discussing the poem. Frost is widely considered a major modern American poet but his relationship to modernism is mostly antagonistic. In our series of short chapters featuring poets' doubts about aspects of the modernist revolution, we consider just this one poem by Frost for its frank but also witty way of raising the issue of the subject-object relations. The speaker and another figure find themselves on either side of a wall. Should that wall come down? Does Frost's answer to that question have anything to do with his famous antimodernist complaint - that free verse is "like playing tennis without a net"?

1. read Robert Frost's "Mending Wall": link to text
2. listen to Robert Frost perform the poem: link to audio
3. watch video discussion of Frost's "Mending Wall": link to video

chapter 6: neo-formalists of the 1950s

There are several ways of looking generally at U.S. poetry in the first postwar (post-World War II) period, 1945-60. No single generalization will do, but our course implies two main trends. First, there was a retrenchment, a "coming home," a consolidation - a mainstreaming of modernism and, for some, a new formalist (or neo-formalist) reaction against what was deemed modernist experimental excess. This consolidation coincided with a renewed cultural caution or conservatism or quietism, generally understood as caused by or aided by fears of communism; concerns about women who had entered the wartime workplace and were now expected to resume domestic life; the ease of life during a time of economic prosperity; the massification of university education; the flight from the cities; and a suburbanization of values and lifestyle. For some this meant assuming modernist gains - free verse, wide choice of subject matter, everyday diction - while suppressing radical experiment. For others this meant an outright antimodernism, although it was now more conservative than the antimodernism of poets in chapters 3 and 5. The latter impulse expressed itself in a neo-classicist use of satire and irony - a kind of new Augustan poetics. Chapter 6 gives us a brief look at this postwar neo-formalism. A second trend, very different, was the explosion of a new poetic radicalism - fueled by a sometimes ecstatic and often antic negative response to the above-mentioned quietism and poetic conservatism. Drawing on the experimental spirit of modernism - and sometimes celebrating the influence of individual modernist poets - this trend very roughly becomes known as the "New American" poetry. The beats of chapter 7 and the New York School poets of chapter 8 are instances of this. There are other New American approaches and groupings, to be sure, but we will not have time to consider them except in passing references. But first let us quickly end our rapid tour through the doubters and troublers of chapters 3, 4, 5 & 6 - with a glance at the neo-formalists.

Tuesday, October 16

1. read Richard Wilbur's "The Death of a Toad": link to text
2. read Richard Wilbur's "Cottage Street, 1953": link to text
3. watch video of Wilbur introducing "Cottage Street, 1953": link to video
4. watch video of Wilbur reading "Cottage Street, 1953": link to video
5. read biographical profile of Sylvia Plath: link
6. read biographical profile of Adrienne Rich: link
7. read Adrienne Rich's "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers": link to text
8. read X. J. Kennedy's "Nude Descending a Staircase": link to text
9. read William Jay Smith's epigram called "Poet": link to text
10. listen to Allen Ginsberg's "Put Down Yr Cigarette Rag" for a hint at what's coming next: link to PennSound

PAPER OPTION #9: There are many differences between X. J. Kennedy's and Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase." What are they? List them and explain each difference, one by one. No need to write a fancily organized essay. Make a list of the differences and explain each, being sure to do some "close reading" of the Duchamp painting and the Kennedy poem. Note: We are aware that this paper entails close reading and isn't a "position paper" like some of the others. But don't shy from taking intepretive positions. For one thing, you should feel free, toward the end, to assert where and how one of the two poems fails and the other succeeds.

chapter 7: breaking conformity - the Beats

The so-called "New American Poetry," emerging in the late 1940s and 1950s, went in many directions; some trends, styles and approaches overlapped and some were or seemed more distinct and separable than others. The "Beat" poets were a fairly distinct community of poets and so it becomes a little easier than otherwise to study their ecstatic, antic, apparently anti-poetic break with official verse culture as a coherent movement. Our approach, in just one week, looks at two "classic" Beats (Ginsberg and Kerouac) and then quickly moves off to adjacent figures. Creeley was not a Beat poet but his most famous poem engages poetic, psychological and social matters with which Ginsberg and Kerouac and the others were obsessed. Anne Waldman is an "outrider" poet and more closely associated with the second generation of "New York School" poets, but was a dear friend of Ginsberg and learned a great deal from his political pedagogy. Amiri Baraka, as Leroi Jones, was a Beat poet for a few years and then broke away. The poem by Baraka we study here gives us a chance to look back on Countee Cullen's traditionally formal poetic response to racist hatred. Our focus on Kerouac is a little unusual; he of course is known more as a novelist than a poet. But his "babble flow" has been a significant influence on contemporary poets - more than his narrative fictional stance as psychosocial itinerant. We will have occasion, then, to examine and question Kerouac's - and implicitly Ginsberg's - claim to be writing naturally spontaneous language. Our Chapter 9 poets for the most part doubt such claims. Above left: Anne Waldman and Jack Kerouac.

Thursday, October 18 - beats #1

1. read Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (part 1): link to text
2. listen to Ginsberg perform "Howl" in 1956: listen to audio
3. listen to a short excerpt of Ginsberg performing "Howl": link to audio
4. read Jack Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose": link to text
5. read Kerouac's "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose": link to text
6. read three passages of Kerouac's spontaneous prose: link to text
7. read the opening paragrahs of Kerouac's "October in the Railroad Earth": link to text
8. listen to Kerouac perform to opening of "October in the Railroad Earth": link to audio
9. read Kerouac's comment to Ted Berrigan on "October in the Railroad Earth": link to text
10. read a passage from Kerouac's On the Road: link to text
11. listen to an episode of PoemTalk about Ginsberg's singing of Blake: link to audio
12. read Clark Coolidge's essay on Kerouac's babble flow: link to text
13. read Allen Ginsberg's Beat poetry syllabus: link to image

Tuesday, October 23 - fall break, no class

Thursday, October 25 - beats #2

1. read Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man": link to text
2A. listen to five PennSound recordings of Creeley performing "I Know a Man": links to recordings
2B. read/listen with text-audio alignment to Creeley's "I Know a Man": link to PennSound
3. listen to an episode of PoemTalk about Creeley's "I Know a Man": link to PoemTalk
4. listen to Anne Waldman perform "Rogue State": link to audio
5. watch video of Waldman perform "Rogue State": link to video
6. read Amiri Baraka's "Incident": link to text
7. listen to an episode of PoemTalk on Baraka's (Leroi Jones's) "Kenyatta Listening to Mozart": link to PoemTalk
8. read Clellon Holmes's classic New York Times Magazine piece, "This Is the Beat Generation": link to text
9. read Robert Creeley on the sentence: link to text
10. listen to Lawrence Ferlinghetti perform "Baseball Canto": link to audio
11. read Herbert Gold on the "beatniks" in 1957: link to text
12. listen to Maggie Estep's performance live on MTV of "That Stupid Jerk I'm Obsessed With": link to audio
13. watch a video of Maggie Estep performing "I'm an Emotional Idiot So Get Away from Me": link to video
14. watch an MTV video promo featuring Maggie Estep: link to video

chapter 8: the rise of postmodernism - the New York School

Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Barbara Guest represent the New York School of poetry in this week of our course. We met Anne Waldman briefly in chapter 7 - from the "second generation" New York School. Here now we add two others of the second generation: Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. Our super-close readings of Guest's "20" and Ashbery's "Some Trees" are intended, in part, to show that the non-narrative or anti-narrative styles of this group - and their propensity for sudden shifts in pronoun and non-sequitur imagery, and for inside-the-community name dropping - nonetheless produce writing that can be interpreted line by line. During this week, a bare-minimum introduction to this playful postmodernity, we will get a bit of pastiche from Koch, several instances of O'Hara's I-do-this-I-do-that explorations of lunchtime, and examples of Ashbery's opaque lyricism, Guest's memory-as-word associationalism, Berrigan's anti-narrative as daily social resistance, and Mayer's application of O'Hara's exuberant dailiness to a woman's life and language.

Tuesday, October 30 - introduction to non-narrative, anti-narrative and pastiche

1. read Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died": link to text
1A. listen to O'Hara perform "The Day Lady Died": link to audio
2. read Kenneth Koch's "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams: link to text
3. read John Ashbery's "The Instruction Manual": link to text
4. listen to John Ashbery perform "The Instruction Manual": link to PennSound

Thursday, November 1 - some first- & second-generation NY School poets

1. read Frank O'Hara's "A Step away from Them": link to text
2. watch a video discussion of O'Hara's "A Step away from Them": link to video
3. read Barbara Guest's "20": link to text
4. listen to Barbara Guest perform "20": link to audio
5. watch a video discussion of Guest's "20": link to video
6. read Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter": link to text
7. read Ted Berrigan's "3 Pages": link to text
8. listen to Berrigan perform "3 Pages": link to PennSound
9. listen to an episode of PoemTalk about Berrigan's "3 Pages": link to PoemTalk
10. read Bernadette Mayer's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers": link to text
11A. listen to Mayer perform "Invasion of the Body Snatchers": link to PennSound
11B. read/listen with text-audio alignment to Mayer's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers": link to PennSound
12. read Frank O'Hara's "At the Old Place": link to text
13. read Lytle Shaw's "At the Old Place": link to text
14. read Frank O'Hara's "Like": link to text

PAPER OPTION #10: Write an essay that presents a close reading of O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter." Be sure to answer the question or problem he poses in the title. Why does he prefer to be a poet? Why is he a poet and not a painter? What, despite all the similarities between what he does as a poet and what Mike Goldberg does as a painter, is finally the difference between the way they work? Note: We are aware that this paper entails close reading and is not a "position paper" like some of the others. But don't shy from taking clear interpretive positions.

PAPER OPTION #11: Write an essay that presents a close reading of O'Hara's poem "Like." Be sure to explain what you think he means by the title. The title word connotes several things. Try to cover everything it connotes and what, if anything, does it have to do with the writing of the poem? Note: We are aware that this paper entails close reading and is not so much a position paper like some of the others. But don't shy from taking clear interpretive positions.

Tuesday, November 6 - Ashbery

1. read John Ashbery's "Some Trees": link to text
2A. listen to Ashbery perform "Some Trees": link to PennSound
2B. read/listen with text-audio alignment to Ashbery's "Some Trees": link to PennSound

Thursday, November 8 - Ashbery, continued

1. read John Ashbery's "Hard Times": link to text
2. read Ashbery's "The One Thing That Can Save America": link to text
3. listen to Ashbery's response to a question from Filreis about "The One Thing That Can Save America": link to PennSound
4. read Ashbery's "The Grapevine": link to text
5. listen to Ashbery perform "The Grapevine": link to PennSound
6. read Ashbery's "What Is Poetry": link to text
7. listen to Ashbery perform "What Is Poetry": link to PennSound
8. read Ashbery's "Crossroads in the Past": link to text
9. listen to Ashbery perform "Crossroads in the Past" at the Writers House: link to PennSound
10. listen to an episode of "PoemTalk" on Ashbery's Crossroads in the Past": link to PoemTalk

PAPER OPTION #12: Write an essay that presents a close reading of Ashbery's "The Grapevine." This is a difficult poem, but do the best that you can. Try to account for every line. And be sure to describe what you think the poem is saying overall/in general. What is its topic or issue?

Friday, November 9, 6 PM at 4616 Osage Avenue - Williams once more

1. read William Carlos Williams's "To Elsie": link to text
2. listen to Williams perform "To Elsie": link to PennSound
3. read comments on the "white trash" to which Williams refers in his poem: link to text

chapter 9 - trends in recent experimental poetry

Now we spend our final weeks surveying three related movements or groupings of experimental poetry, covering recent decades to the present. In chapter 9.1 we look at the so-called "Language Poetry" movement as it emerged in the San Francisco Bay area and New York in particular in the 1970s and early 1980s. In chapter 9.2, we turn to chance-generated and aleatory and quasi-nonintentional writing. In chapter 9.3, we look at the recent emergence (or resurgence) of conceptual poetry. Several of the 9.2 poets follow directly from the innovations of the 9.1 Language poets. A few of the 9.3 conceptualists see themselves as breaking away from Language poetry and embrace a "post-avant" status, while others see a continuity from modernism through Language writing and aleatory writing to conceptualism. The extent to which all these poets - but especially the 9.1 and 9.2 poets - show their indebtedness to modernists such as Duchamp, Stein, and Williams and proto-modernist Dickinson - does suggest that our course is the study of a line or lineage of experimental American poetry continuing out of modernism.

chapter 9.1: an introduction to language poetry

By starting with Silliman's "Albany" and Hejinian's My Life, we focus on ways in which - and reasons why - Language poets refused conventional sequential, cause-and-effect presentations of the writing self. The self is languaged - is formed by and in language - and is multiple across time (moments and eras) and thus from paratactic sentence to paratactic sentence. While this radical revision of the concept of the lyric self (and of the genre of memoir) emphasizes one aspect of the Language Poetry movement at the expense of several other important ideas and practices, it is, we feel, an excellent way to introduce the group. Bob Perelman's "Chronic Meanings," aside from its contribution to this introduction, also picks up a theme of our course: the experimental writer attempts to encounter death (loss, grief, absence) by somehow making the form of the writing befit that discontinuity and disruption. We began this theme with Stein's "Let Us Decide" and continued it with O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died," and will proceed with Jackson Mac Low's "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore" in chapter 9.2. Above, left to right: Susan Howe, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian.

Tuesday, November 13

1. read Ron Silliman's "Albany": link to text
2. listen to Silliman perform "Albany": link to PennSound
3. read four sections of Lyn Hejinian's My Life: link to PDF copy
4. listen to Lyn Hejinian read these sections of My Life: link to audio

PAPER OPTION #13: For this paper, read and listen to our excerpt from Hejinian's My Life and read and listen to Silliman's "Albany" and think about what the two poems have in common in terms of their attitude toward autobiographical writing. What specifically do they have in common? Be sure to consider, at least briefly in your paper, the way that a poet like Frank O'Hara handled describing a life in his poems. Do the life-writings of Silliman and Hejinian flow out of some or all of O'Hara's ideas?

Thursday, November 15

1. read Bob Perelman's "Chronic Meanings": link to text
2. read Bob Perelman's commentary on "Chronic Meanings": link to text
3. listen to Bob Perelman talk briefly about "Chronic Meanings": link to PennSound
4. listen to Perelman perform "Chronic Meanings": link to PennSound
5. read Charles Bernstein's "In a Restless World Like This Is": link to text
6. listen to Bernstein perform "In a Restless World Like This Is": link to PennSound
7. listen to a PoemTalk episode on Bernstein's "In a Restless World Like This Is": link to PoemTalk
8. read Ron Silliman's "BART": link to text
9. listen to Ron Silliman perform "BART": link to audio
10. listen to a discussion with Silliman about "BART": link to audio [optional]
11. read Emily Dickinson's "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun --": link to text
12. read passages from Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson: link to text
13. listen to an excerpt of Charles Bernstein's conversation with Susan Howe about Emily Dickinson: link to PennSound
14. listen to Rae Armantrout read and comment on "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun": link to PennSound
15. listen to an episode of PoemTalk about Howe's Dickinson: link to PoemTalk
16. watch video discussion of Howe's Dickinson: link to ModPo video
17. read William Stafford's "Traveling through the Dark": link to text
18. listen to Stafford perform "Traveling through the Dark": link to audio
19. read Rae Armantrout's "Traveling through the Yard": link to text
20. listen to Rae Armantrout perform "Traveling through the Yard": link to PennSound
21. listen to Al Filreis and Rae Armantrout talk about Stafford's poem and her parody of it: link to audio
22. read Rae Armantrout's "Overhearing": link to text
23. listen to Rae Armantrout perform "Overhearing": link to PennSound
24. listen to Al Filreis & Rae Armantrout talk about "Overhearing": link to audio

chapter 9.2 - chance

When Jackson Mac Low put a body of language (for instance a poem by Gertrude Stein) through a rigorous procedure, he would say that he created (or "wrote" - in the sense of computer programming) the procedure and that the procedure created the poem. One of his goals was to experiment with the elimination or evacuation or at least the suppression of poetic ego. In this sense his work stands alongside that of Silliman and Hejinian who (by other means) sought to question the stable lyric subject that had been for so long been associated with the writing of poetry, and with imagination generally. On this point the chapter 9 poets are unified in breaking from modernism's implicit and often explicit claim of creative, a-world-in-a-poem-making genius. But otherwise the aesthetic connection between, for instance, Mac Low and Stein is strongly positive. Above, left to right: Jena Osman, John Cage, Joan Retallack, Jackson Mac Low.

Tuesday, November 20 - chance #1

1. read Matthew McCabe's introduction to John Cage and mesostics: link to text
2. read a brief excerpt from John Cage's "Writing through Howl": link to text
3. read three pages on Cage's "Howl" by Marjorie Perloff: link to text
4. read a selection of John Cage's adagia: link to text
5. watch video discussion of Cage's adagia: link to video
6. listen to John Cage on why he seeks to "mak[e] English less understandable": link to audio
7. use Matthew McCabe's mesostomatic to make a mesostic poem from any poem in our course: link
8. listen to an excerpt from Jackson Mac Low's performance of "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore": link to audio
9. read a paragraph about Mac Low with reference to Peter Innisfree Moore: link to text
10. read an article about Peter Innisfree Moore: link to text
11. read Jackson Mac Low's instructions for the performance of "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore": link to text

PAPER OPTION #14: If you think Jackson Maclow's poem-performance based on 960 words and letters formed from the name of his deceased friend, "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore," is both beautiful and intellectually legitimate and interesting, take the occasion of writing this paper to argue that position. Be sure to link this to your own defense of "chance" poetry in general.

Thanksgiving break

Tuesday, November 27 - chance #2

1. listen to Jackson Mac Low's 1978 reading of Stein's "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass": link to PennSound
2. listen to Mac Low's comments on reading Stein's Tender Buttons: link to PennSound
3. read and listen to "Stein 100" by Mac Low, from his series of quasi-nonintentional writings-through Tender Buttons: link to text & audio
4. watch video discussion of Mac Low on Stein: link to video
5. read Jena Osman's "Dropping Leaflets": link to text
6. listen to Jena Osman perform "Dropping Leaflets": link to PennSound
7. listen to a PoemTalk episode about Osman's "Dropping Leaflets": link to PoemTalk
8. listen to a 4-minute conversation among Jena Osman and Kenneth Goldsmith and former English 88'ers about Osman's "Dropping Leaflets": link to PennSound
9. listen to a 17-minute discussion among Osman, Goldsmith and 88'ers about Jackson Mac Low (who had just died a few days earlier): link to PennSound
10. read Bernadette Mayer's list of writing experiments: link to text
11. read Joan Retallack's "Not a Cage": link to text
12. listen to Joan Retallack performing "Not a Cage": link to PennSound
13. listen to a PoemTalk episode on Retallack's "Not a Cage": link to PoemTalk

chapter 9.3: conceptualism and unoriginality

Not every artist we meet here claims to be part of a trend or movement now widely known as conceptualist poetics. Some embrace or have embraced the term: Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Bok, Caroline Bergvall. Others, such as Rosmarie Waldrop, have been involved in appropriative and unoriginal practices for decades. Erica Baum is a photographer of found language who seems to thrive in the atmosphere created by the explicit conceptualists. Michael Magee is an original Flarfist, which some see as divergent from conceptualism but here at least seems certainly a cousin. Others we encounter in our final week (Jennifer Scappettone and Tracie Morris) are using unoriginality and linguistic borrowing and "writing through" for their own reasons and are creating distinct effects. But every artist in chapter 9.3 displays an intense virtuosity that defies what most folks at first expect from writings made from such an adamant rejection of creativity. We hope that despite the strangeness of it all you will find a great deal of pleasure in watching them undertake their hyper-concentrated, seemingly impossible projects. What can look easy in such experimentalism is often demanding in the extreme. Is there a better example of this than Eunoia? Left to right: Christian Bok, Tracie Morris, Erica Baum's "Card Catalogues," Kenneth Goldsmith.

Thursday, November 29 & Tuesday, December 4

1. read "Act 1" of Kenneth Goldsmith's "Soliloquy": link to PDF
1A. read about Goldsmith in The Wall Street Journal: link
2. read "chapter E" of Christian Bok's Eunoia: link to text
3. listen to Christian Bok perform "chapter E" of Eunoia: link to PennSound
4. read and look at Erica Baum's Card Catalogues: link to PDF
5. read and look at Erica Baum's Dog Ear: link to PDF
6. watch video discussion of Erica Baum's art: link to video
7. listen to Caroline Bergvall's "VIA": link to PennSound
8. read Caroline Bergvall's "VIA": link to text
9. read Brian Reed's essay on Bergvall's "VIA": link to text
10. read Mike Magee's "Pledge" from Morning Constitutional: link to text
11. read Ron Silliman on Michael Magee's My Angie Dickinson: link to text
12. read a selection of poems from Magee's My Angie Dickinson: link to text
13. read Michael Magee's description of the methodology of My Angie Dickinson: link to text
14. read Michael Magee's definition of "flarf" poetry for Charles Bernstein: link to text
15. watch video on Magee's "Pledge" & My Angie Dickinson: link to video
16. read Rosmarie Waldrop's "Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence": link to text
17. listen to Waldrop perform "Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence": link to PennSound
18. listen to PoemTalk about Waldrop's "Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence": link to program notes & audio
19. read Jennifer Scappettone's "Vase Poppies": link to text
20. listen to Scappettone reading "Vase Poppies": link to audio
21. listen to PoemTalk episode on Scappettone's "Vase Poppies" and H.D."s "Sea Poppies": link to PoemTalk & H.D. text
22. listen to Tracie Morris introduce and perform "Afrika": link to audio
23. watch a video of Tracie Morris performing "Afrika": link to video
24. listen to musical arrangement of "Afrika" with Val Jeanty: link to PennSound
25. read a passage from Kenneth Goldsmith's Traffic: link to text
26. watch video recording of Goldsmith reading Traffic at the White House: link to YouTube

PAPER OPTION #15: For this paper, go to PennSound's page presenting the English 88-sponsored conversation between Jena Osman and Kenneth Goldsmith. Read summaries of the segmented audio recording of this event, and then listen to all the audio segments of the discussion. Write a paper that summarizes the discussion and explains the somewhat different positions taken by Osman and Goldsmith. Their art and ideas are certainly related; they are certainly in the same "camp" or faction of contemporary poetry and poetics. But they differ on several key issues. What are these issues? Osman is more aligned with the chapter 9.2 poets and Goldsmith of course is more aligned with the chapter 9.3 poets and artists. Use this paper as an opportunity to make general distinctions between chapters 9.2 and 9.3. You can probably already tell that this paper will be longer than the others; you may write as long an essay as you think appropriate to the topic. Note that this paper is due on Tuesday, November 29.

Thursday, December 6: final words

final/non-"final" exam (time & deadlines TBA)