Reading & Writing Assignments

UNIT 1: COMPOSITION AS EXPLANATION

Sept 7, nothing changes except composition

Bring a favorite poem or memoir (full or selected). We'll use these for an in-class writing experiment.

READING:

--from "Composition as Explanation" by Gertrude Stein

Yoko Ono's idea of license, the setting up of a situation where others could complete a work of art instead of the artist, was a radical departure from the existing concept of the role of the artist.
-Jon Hendricks

--from The Tapeworm Foundry by Darren Werschler Henry

WRITING:

--in class: we will write a series of at least 10 instructions, recipes or propositions for a poem

TERMS/ISSUES:

form, content, labor, process, instructional writing, authorship

"what is seen, said & made" (JR)

what can an inherited or tradition form do?

what can it not do?

what happens when we invent or imagine or propose new forms and new procedures?

UNIT 2: WHAT IS SEEN

Sept 21 Imagism, Vorticism, Objectism

READING:

-- "Vortext" by Ezra Pound (JR)

The vorticist relies on this alone : on the primary pigment of his art, nothing else. Every

conception, every emotion presents itself to the vivid conscious in some primary form

-Ezra Pound

-- "Canto XXXIX" by Ezra Pound (JR)

-- "Projective Verse" Charles Olson (JR)

And the line comes, (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination.
–Charles Olson

It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a

poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the

bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter,

record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how

he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work. –Charles Olson

WRITING:

-- thinking about what is seen, and how everybody is doing everything, about how to “use the machine as a scoring to [ones] own composing, as a script to its vocalization,” consider if “not the eye but the ear was to be [verse’s] measurer.” and recall the push towards the ideogramatic and objectism: a poem that presents, rather than comments upon. in other words, compose a piece inspired by Pound and/or Olson.

TERMS:

Imagism, Vorticism, materials, "projective verse," synchronicity, consciousness, composition by field, the object

UNIT 3: OBJECTIVISM

Sept 28 NO CLASS

READING:

--from "Discrete Series" by George Oppen (JR)

-- "Of Being Numerous" by George Oppen (BB)

-- "Mantis" by Zukofsky (JR 246)

-- "Mantis, An Interpretation" by Zukofsky (JR 248)

WRITING:

-- write a piece that works to think with the things as they exist.

TERMS/ISSUES:

Sincerity, objectification

UNIT 4: SURREALISM & DADA

Oct 19

READING:

--from The History of Surrealism Maurice Nadeau

--First Manifesto of Surrealism

--"Yellow Manifesto" by Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, etc.

-- "Dada is American" by Walter Conrad Arensberg (JR)

--How to make a Dadaist Poem by Tristan Tzara

--Dada Excites Everything Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, etc.

--Free Union André Breton (JR)

--Kurt Schwitters to the Swiss Dadaist Arp. Blackberries (2) Kurt Schwitters

--The and Rendez-vouz du Dimache 6 Fevrier 1916 by Marcel Duchamp (JR)

-- "Poem, 1924" by Andre Breton
-- from A Book of Surrealist Games compiled by Alastair Brotchie

IN-CLASS:

Surrealist games and writing activities [Bring: scissors, images, words]

*Automatism

*Chain Games/Collaborative writing:

WRITING:

--Use Oct 12 in-class writing activities towards a "finished" piece

--Optional: write a manifesto. A manifesto is a public statement that sets forth the tenets of a forthcoming, existing, or potential movement or "ism" – or that plays on the idea of one.

TERMS/ISSUES:

Automatic writing, chance, DADA, surrealism, cut-ups, collage poetry, subconscious

UNIT 5: OULIPO, POTENTIAL LITERATURE

Oct 26 The Analytic: art as retrieval

READING:

-- "Oulipo: The First Manifesto" by Le Lionnais

Prisoner's Restriction: a russian con's economic missive Ian Monk

-- The Poet as Outlaw Harry Matthews

-- "Summary" from A Void Georges Perec

-- Lines read at Alix-Cleo Blanchett's and Jacques Roubaud's Bridal G.Perec

WRITING:

-- Locate a constraint in the Oulipo Compendium. In your own words, explain the constraint or process. Then, write a piece that practices the procedure. Write a process note at the top.

.

TERMS/ISSUES:

constraint, machine, potentiality