UNIT 7: FOUND & “SOUGHT” POETRY

READING:
Art is action, but it does not cause action: rather it prepares us for thought.
Art is intellectual, but it does not cause thought: rather it prepares us for thought.
Art is not a world, but a knowing of the world. Art prepares us.
-- Muriel Rukeyser from The Life of Poetry
-- "Investigating the Procedure: Poetry and the Source" by Kristin Prevallet
-- "Johannesberg Mines" by Langston Hughes
-- "Hoyt Lakes / Shut Down," "June 19, 1982" & "Francine Michalek Drives Bread" from Shut Up/Shut Down by Mark Nowak
-- blog post "Poetics (Mine)" by Mark Nowak
-- from The Fate of Humanity in Verse by Frank Rogecewski
-- from Testimony by Charles Reznikoff
-- Interviews about Testimony -- Davidson, On Testimony and Documentary Culture -- Excerpts from critical commentary on Testimony
-- from Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser
-- critical interpretations via MAPS
-- background for Hawk's Nest Incident -- transcript of Congressional Investigation -- Hawk's Nest Tunnel archival materials

WRITING:

--Write a poem/memoir using (or reimagining, recasting) the methods of Nowak, Reznikoff, Rukeyser or Rogecewski.

TERMS/ISSUES:

documentary poetry, populist poetry, political poetry

can poetry contain history?
can poetry make history?

How might the reader (and the writer) here act as investigator, transcriptionist, historian, witness, interpreter, confessor?

Nov 23 the documentary poem

Nov 30 cento, collage, assemblage

READING:
The dramatic juxtaposition of disparate materials without commitment to
explicit syntactical relations between columns –David Antin

My writing is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber. -Marianne Moore

--from Woman's World Graham Rawle
-- "An Octopus" by Marianne Moore (JR 72)
--from "Poem Beginning 'The'" by Louis Zukofsky (JR 241)
-- "Tarkington Cento" by Richard Meier
-- "Ode: Salute to the New York School" by Peter Gizzi
--Apropos of Readymades Marcel Duchamp
--SemiCento Bob Holman

WRITING:

--Write a piece using one (or more) of the methods of our readings

TERMS/ISSUES:

collage, cento, pastiche, assemblage, readymades, appropriation, citationality, the coterie

Dec 7 “Sought” poetry / flarf

READING:

--from The Flarf Files Gary Sullivan
--from The Flarf Files Michael Magee
--from My Angie Dickinson Michael Magee
--Peace Kittens K. Silem Mohammed

IN CLASS:

Discuss final project (due in class Dec 14)

WRITING:
-- Use google-search results as the source material for a poem or memoir. As K. Silem Mohammed instructs: "You punch a keyword or keywords into Google and work directly with the result text that gets thrown up. I paste the text into Word and just start stripping stuff away until what's left is interesting to me, then I start meticulously chipping away and fussing with that. It's similar to normal writing, but like you have a head injury that only gives you access to certain words and structures"

TERMS/ISSUES:

Flarf, "sought" poetry, the digital age, moving information, conceptual poetry

What kind of poem / Would you / Make out of that? --Langston Hughes

Where, are the poems bridging and building transnational social and aesthetic networks of alternative and agitational modes of grammar and syntax, revolutionary poetic critiques of corporate culture (the contemporary complement to Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead)?
--Mark Nowak, from "Notes on Anti-Capitalist Poetics"

One is led not merely to read comparatively but to read chorally, to see these poems not as entries in a competition but as mutually responsive contributions to an emerging revolutionary consensus. --Cary Nelson, Revolutionary Memory

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