Reading List by

Michele Leggott

    Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

  • 8 sessions at 2hrs each
  • Thinking up an outline here to begin there
  • If people have the Complete Short Poetry plus A, we're in business. Guess I'll xerox other bits and pieces?

Week One (1-4 April)

1. Intro. Your reading of Zukofsky, my reading of Zukofsky. Our reading of Zukofsky? 1970 AN ERA, Valentine, postcards, tricolor sign-off, dedications, 's = z ears and eyes. Little wrists. Drive, fast kisses, a mouth at her ear. Cig crackle at poet's ear. Look into your ear. CZ, see, sea, centum, cento, centuple + 100 lines of "A"-22 "an" song. 1970 is the last big jumping point, intended to take in the millenium. Look at Epigraph and #80 Zinnia. Look at Much Ado About Trees. Consider shape of Complete Short Poetry.

2. "A" 22 &23 (1970-74). Big and little, much in little. Navigating within frames leaves you free to float about listening. Voices, variations. Natural history, human history, 5000 years of written record sounded. And Music Sections. Notebooks, blueprints, workshop. The role of Texas 1963-97. Ch. 1-2 of ML. Look at close of "A"-23

Zinnia
With prayer-plant eyes annually winter-leggy
zinnia miracles itself perennial return
blest interim strength lengthening coreopsis'-summers
actual some time whereso near
zebra-fragrant sharpened wave currents tide
new moon to full sunrise
sunset enable ships seaworth slow-rounds
rosette lancers speared-yucca's white night

Week Two (7-11 April)

1. Catullus, "A"-7 (Kora!), the two translations of Catullus 8. Reading the passionate old guy's lips like an ignorant American. WCW's SAPPHO "Peer of the gods is that man" vs. "I feel sick," VOICES. Close read passage in "A"-22: (i) coming in cold (ii) after some dictionary work (iii) having looked at the mss. Tapes: Cats, "A"-7, "A"-22.

2. Bottom: on Shakespeare: Part One and "Contiments." SEEING CLEAR. Clear-eyed physical vision, versus the mind;s eye. Vision? Visions? Alphabet of Subjects, Alphabet of Creation. What price the Zohar? Valentines and some Flowers (pick out 11 April anniversary plus Shak birthday dedications).

Privet
League gust strum ovally folium
looped leaf nodes winter icejewel
platinum stoneseed true ebony berries
gray-jointed persistent thru green
hedge ash-or-olive order white panicles
heavy with daffodil doxy red blood pale
reign paired leaves without tooth
on edge primmed private privet

Week Three (14-19 April) (This gets loose . . .)

Jenny P will be here from 15-19th.which means double tracking with her Niedecker material. She wants to look at the Lake Superior Poems compositionally. This will take up one session (Wednesday?). We'll use previous discussion of "A" and Flowers composition to compare LN's approach to the writing of a long poem at a time when she's not directly influenced by LZ. For this to work, you need to have read "Lake Superior" and Jenny's commentary on it in the Correspondence.

This might be the week in which to organise a right-through reading of the Flowers alongside same for "Lake Superior" and whatever other LN Jenny suggests.

Friday session could be allocated for JP's presentation of new LN mss poems. Enlarging what is known.

Week Four (22-26 April)

1. 80 Flowers intensive. Your Turn. Audio surface impressions, associations of title flower, take it apart for reference. Then? Multiple audience, multiple reading. Unreadable. A rose is a rose is a rose . . . and they are Tender Buttons, deictic, private, virtuoso. Now they are also (Udo Kasemets) musucal settings. Time to talk about "A"-24 and performance. And what else?

2. Friday/Saturday is conference. We can schedule an alternative seminar meeting earlier in the week if anyone feels like it. If anyone is still standing. Over to you.