the rise of imagism

introductions to imagism

• notes on imagism from Amy Lowell's Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917)
• Susan Sontag on modernism
• audio: an introduction to imagism read by Al Filreis
• passage on imagism in the Norton headnote to Ezra Pound (Norton, p. 376 from "He profited from the friendship..." to "...was a force rather than a picture.")
• imagism briefly defined
• on the antimodernist's view of imagism
• the "objective" photographic art of Alfred Stieglitz
• headnote to H.D. (Norton, pp. 409-11)
  readings in imagism
  
• H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], "Sea Rose"
• H.D., "Garden" (Norton, p. 411)
• H.D., "Oread" (Norton, p. 412)
• imagism per Edward Dahlberg
• Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro" (Norton, p. 381)
• William Carlos Williams, a translation of a poem by Li Po
• Pound, "The Encounter"
• Richard Aldington, "Daisy" (1915)
• William Carlos Williams, "Lines"
• audio: Al Filreis and Shawn Walker on Williams's "Lines"
• audio: mp3 version of the above
• Williams, "The Great Figure" (Norton, p. 317)
• Charles Demuth, The Figure 5 in Gold: oil on composition board; 35 1/2 x 30 in. (90.2 x 76.2 cm). The painting was said by Demuth to have been inspired by Williams's "The Great Figure."
• Williams, "so much depends" or "The Red Wheelbarrow"
• Roy Harvey Pearce on Williams' "so much depends"
• on Williams's "so much depends" in relation to Duchamp's idea of the readymade, a audio presentation with eleven "slides"
• Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain"
• Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" (1917), a readymade
• Duchamp, eye chart (1919?)
• The Armory Show
• Marcel Duchamp: a review of a recent exhibit summarized Duchamp's "readymade" art and the art of replication
• Williams, "Flowers by the Sea" (Norton, p. 321)
• audio: Al Filreis & Shawn Walker discuss WCW's "Flowers by the Sea" (mp3)
• Williams, "The Quality of Heaven"
• Williams, "Between Walls"
• audio: Williams reading "Between Walls"
• Carl Rakosi, "ZZZZZZ"
• Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways...Blackbird"
• Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar" (Norton, p. 288)
• Stevens, "Study of Two Pears" (Norton, p. 295 )
• Ernest Hemingway, from the story "On the Quai at Smyrna," In Our Time (1925)
• audio: George Blaustein reads from Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River," a vignette from in our time (a book of modernist writing very much part of the experimentalist scene: first published in Paris, first printed at the "three mountains press" and originally for sale at Shakespeare & Company, 1924)
• audio: Al Filreis & Shawn Walker on cubist language - [mp3]
• poetic terms: "haiku", "free verse"
  supplemental/optional readings:
• Wallace Stevens - brief bio
• Guillaume Appolinaire, "There Is"
• Wallace Stevens web site
• (example of latter-day imagism) Bruce Weigl, "Rapture" (1992)

William Carlos Williams: no ideas but in things!

Dr. Williams - the pediatrian taking a break on a porch off an upper floor of Passaic General Hospital, 1936

• headnote to William Carlos Williams (Norton, p. 312)
• William Carlos Williams, "Spring and All," "At the Ballgame," "This Is Just to Say," "Portrait of a Lady," "The Young Housewife" (Norton, pp. 318-22)
• video: Williams's commentary on "This Is Just to Say," including Flossie's response & an animated dramatization of the marital narrative
• audio: WCW's commentary on "This Is Just to Say," including Flossie's response (mp3)
• Flossie Wiliams's reply to her husband's "This Is Just to Say"
• Wim Delvoye artworks (courtesy Kenneth Goldsmith)
• Williams, "At the ballgame"
• Williams, "The rose is obsolete"
• Bob Martin, WCW Hallmark card to go with "The rose is obsolete"
• Saul Steinberg cartoon: [the painter's muse brings flowers]
• video: mini-lecture by Al Filreis intended (a) as a reading of Williams's "The rose is obsolete, and (b) as an introduction to the writing of Stein by way of H.D.'s "Sea Rose," Williams's "The rose is obsolete," Williams's "Portrait of a Lady" and Stein's cubist portrait-in-language of Picasso
• Williams, both versions of "Young Woman at a Window": version 1, version 2
• Williams, "A poem is a small...machine"
  supplemental/optional readings:
• on "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"

Stein: the grammar turned & attacked me

• Gertrude Stein biography
• Williams on Stein
• Edith Sitwell on Stein
• Miriam Allen deFord attacks modernism's "cult of incomprehensibility"
• Stein on doing nothing
• Robert Creeley on reading difficult poetry, including Stein's
• Stein, "A Very Valentine"
• Stein, "Christian Berard" portrait (PDF)
• Stein, "Let Us Describe"
• Sherwood Anderson on Stein

  Gertrude Stein (photography by Carl Van Vechten)

• Gertrude Stein, from Tender Buttons: "Water Raining"
• Gertrude Stein, "A long dress" from Tender Buttons
• Robert Grenier on Tender Buttons
• Stein, "Readings"
• audio: Al Filreis & Shawn Walker discuss Stein's "Readings" (mp3)
• Gertrude Stein, "Is Dead" (1936)
• Stein, on narrative
• Stein, on textual movement
• Stein on the noun (1935)
• Stein, on composition
• Stein, "Composition as Explanation" as read (and commented on) by Joan Retallack
• cubism defined
• Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) (at the Philadelphia Museum of Art)
• Picasso's "Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler" (1910)
• Stein, "If I Told Him" (A Completed Portrait of Pablo Picasso) (a transcription)
• Marjorie Perloff discusses Stein on nouns and Stein's portraits (an mp3 file, excerpt from a 1999 discussion with English 88)
• Picasso's portrait of Stein
• Stein a naturalist?
• Stein on "loving repeating"
• Stein on writing clearly
• Stein on "speaking english"
• audio: Stein reading her "If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Pablo Picasso)"
• An interview with Stein
• W. G. Rogers on Stein: not what it is, but what it does
• Wallace Fowlie on Stein: a contract between words and thought
• Stein's review of Alfred Kreymborg's Troubador

  Picasso's portrait of Stein

• Mark Van Doren's "First Glance," a review of the same book
• Stein, "Any one doing something and standing"
• Gertrude Stein on similarity & difference
• Lyn Hejinian reads her own work through the influence of Stein
• Tracie Morris, "It All Started When"
  supplemental/optional readings:
• Marjorie Perloff at the Writers House - Wednesday, October 20, 1999 - conversation with Bob Perelman and Al Filreis about Stein
• Michael Gold on Gertrude Stein, "A Literary Idiot" (from the Communist New Masses)
• Stein, "Reflections on the Atomic Bomb"
• Gertrude Stein per John Ashbery from a 1957 review
• Gertrude Stein web site

week 6a - Oct. 18-21 - "Talking about things that are understandable only weighs down the mind": modernism at extremes

• Albert Jarry
• Maxwell Bodenheim (as remembered by Ben Hecht)
• William Carlos Williams on the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven (from his autobiography)
• Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, "A Dozen Cocktails, Please"
• audio: a biographical profile of the Baroness from the sixth issue of Sulphur (1983), read by Shawn Walker
• audio: a sketch of the Baroness from Kenneth Rexroth's American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, read by George Blaustein
• The Baroness look in 2002
• student dresses as Baroness
• headnote to Hart Crane (Norton, p.598-600)
• Tristan Tzara, "How to Make a Dadaist Poem"
• audio: Salvador Dali is asked about Freud
• Sara Teasdale, "The Look"
• Edna St. Vincent Millay, headnote, First Fig," "Grown Up," "Love is Not All: It is Not Meat Nor Drink" (Norton, p. 523-526)
• poetic term: "sonnet"
• John Peale Bishop, "A Recollection"
  supplemental/optional readings:
• James Joyce's Ulysses reviewed in The New York Times in 1922: "Not ten men or women out of a hundred can read "Ulysses" through, and of the ten who succeed in doing so, five of them will do it as a tour de force. I am probably the only person, aside from the author, that has ever read it twice from beginning to end. I have learned more psychology and psychiatry from it than I did in ten years at the Neurological Institute."
• Dave Barry, "That's Not a Trash Bag - It's Art!" (2003)
• Millay biography
• concrete poetry