Chapter 9 - You Can't Say It That Way Anymore

Tuesday, November 19 - Introduction to Language Poetry

• Jerome McGann, "Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes" (W)
• George Hartley, "Textual Politics & the Language Poets" (W)
• Charles Bernstein, passage from "Dysraphism" (B & W)
• Charles Bernstein, "Whose Language" (P570)
• Susan Howe, bio (P346-47)
• Susan Howe, two passages from My Emily Dickinson (W)
• Kathleen Fraser, "re:searches (fragments, after Anakreon, for Emily Dickinson" (P356)
• Language poetry summaries ("This Language We Come Up Against")
• Ron Silliman, bio (P489-90)
• Ron Silliman, "Albany" (B)
• Shawn Walker, "Emory Jason Watkins" (W)
• Shawn Walker, "When You Read the Love Poem That She Wrote You Last Tuesday" (W)
• Shawn Walker, "64 cent sonnet" (W)
• Rae Armantrout, "Language of Love," "Attention" (P514-17)
• Ron Padgett, "Nothing in That Drawer" (P401)
• Carla Harryman, "Realism" (P580)
• Tom Mandel, "Realism" (P418-19)

Thursday, November 21 - Procedurality and the Politics of Poetic Form

• Marjorie Perloff, two readings from her book Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media:
  Chapter 5, "The Return of the (Numerical) Repressed" (H)
  Chapter 7, "cage: chance: change" (W) [under construction]
  
• John Cage, "Empty Words" (August 8, 1974)
  Audio .au format | Length: 45 sec. || Size: 500K || Hear It
  
• "A Man Inspired by Chance", a New York Times Book Review review of John Cage's I - VI: Method Structure Intention Discipline Notation Indeterminacy Interpenetration Imitation Devotion Circumstances Variable Structure Nonunderstanding Contingency Inconsistency Performance (1990) (W)
• Brief informal description of the 1995 Cage "exhibit" (W)
• John Cage quotations (W)
• John Cage, passage from "Writing through Howl" (B & W)
• Mike Magee's "Pledge" from Morning Constitutional (1999) [Note: click on "Handwritten Press," then choose "primary texts" at far right, then choose "Morning Constitutional" in Adobe Acrobat format.]
• Leo Marks - World War II spy code-maker (using poetry as source-text)
• John Cage, epigrams from "Themes & Variations" (P621-26)
• Bernadette Mayer, "Sonnet (Beauty of songs)" (P468)
• UbuWeb Visual & Concrete Poetry arranged by Kenny Goldsmith and others
• Jack Spicer, "Thing Language"
• Chomskybot - a randomly selected arrangement of a paragraph of words by linguist Noam Chomsky (W)
• Political Babble Generator - randomized political speeches
• Laurie Anderson's "Here" - 'a song [says Anderson] using only the one hundred most used words in English. I wanted to get away from the words I almost automatically use as a writer and see if I could say something with very simple materials. The list I was working with was generated from written English as it is used, for example, in national news magazines. This original list, however, had very few nouns. It was mostly glue and pointers indicating position in time and space--to, from, between, over, after--and therefore pretty hard to write with. It also included "men" but not "women," "no" but not "yes" and other peculiarities.'
• Naming norms in Norway (Associated Press article printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer)
• Lee Ann Brown's "Multiplicity Sisters" exercise
• David Trinidad, "Movin' with Nancy," "Double Trouble" (both in P596-98) (W)
• Shawn Walker, "Sestina" (W)
• Paul Violi, "Index," "Rifacimento" (both in P436-37)
• Jackson MacLow, bio, "Trope Market," "Antic Quatrains" (both in P68-74)
• Jackson MacLow, poem-performance of 960 words (and letters) derived from the name of a deceased friend (August 11, 1975)
  Audio .au format | Beginning piece -- Length: 45 sec. || Size: 750K || Hear It
  Audio .au format | Another Clip -- Length: 68 sec. || Size: 1,000K || Hear It
  

  Optional readings:
  

• "I Am a Senior" by Alex Edelman (a career-information computer poem)
• Jackson MacLow, "Nine Light Poems" (W)
• Dennis Saleh, "Why I Do Not Write"
• Exquisite Corpse web site
• William B. Hunt's hundred-word prose poems, "The Presentations" (W)
• Sun & Moon Press catalogue and excerpts from their publications (W)
• Al Filreis informally on "below the word"
• Computer-generated writing (W)
• Albert Gelpi's critique of postmodern poetry (W)

Tuesday, November 26

• Bob Perelman, Virtual Reality (all poems in book)
• Perelman on his poem "Chronic Meanings"
• "Perpetual Motion: What Makes Bob Perelman Run?" (B)
• Bob Perelman bibliography

Tuesday, December 3 - How Radical Is Radical Artifice?

• Ron Silliman on political poets (W)
• Bob Perelman, "Poetry and Normative Language" (B)
• Bob Perelman, passage from Captive Audience (B)
• Barrett Watten, "Introduction to the Letter T" (B)
• Ron Silliman, "The Political Economy of Poetry" (B)
• Brian Kim Stefans responds to an attack on language poetry as institutionalized (1999)
• Bruce Andrews, "Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Practice" (P)
• Bruce Andrews--from an interview
• Louis Cabri describes the Bruce Andrews/Rod Smith PhillyTalks exchange
• Bob Perelman, "Chronic Meanings" (in Virtual Reality)
• Interview with Bob Perelman
• Bob Perelman's "Must Works of Art Reflect Only Marketplace Values?" (W)
• Jennifer Moxley, "Invective Verse"
• Shawn Walker, "America as a Postmodern Poem" (W)
• Newspaper story on politicians and poets (July 1996) (W)
• Jed Rasula, excerpt from an essay entitled "The Empire's New Clothes: Anthology American Poetry in the 1990s" (W)
• (Optional:) George Landow's course on cybertheory at Brown (W)

Document URL: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/chap9.html
Last modified: Wednesday, 18-Mar-2009 08:22:57 EDT