Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)

We conclude ModPo week 5 with chapter 6. There are several ways of looking generally at U.S. poetry in the postwar (post-World War II) period, 1945-60. No single generalization will suffice, but our course implies two main trends. First, there was a retrenchment, a “coming home,” a consolidation—a mainstreaming of modernism and, for some, a new formalist (or "neo-formalist") reaction against what was deemed to be modernist experimental excess. This consolidation coincided with a general renewed cultural conservatism or quietism, generally understood as caused or aided by several factors: fears of communism, concerns about women who had entered the wartime workplace and were now expected to resume domestic life, the apparent ease of daily life during a time of economic growth, the "massification" of university education, the flight from cities, and the suburbanization of values and lifestyle. For some, this meant assuming modernist gains—free verse, wide choice of subject matter, everyday diction—while suppressing radical experiment. For others, it meant an outright antimodernism, though it was now more conservative than the antimodernism of poets in chapters 3 and 5. The latter impulse expressed itself in a neo-classicist use of satire and irony—a kind of new Augustan poetics. Chapter 6 gives us a very brief look at this postwar neo-formalism. A second, very different, trend was the explosion of a new poetic radicalism fueled by a sometimes ecstatic and often antic negative response to the above-mentioned quietism and poetic conservatism. Drawing on the experimental spirit of modernism and sometimes celebrating the influence of individual modernist poets, this trend generally came to be known as the “New American” poetry. The Beats of chapter 7 and the New York School poets of chapter 8 are instances of this trend. There are other New American approaches and groupings, to be sure, but we will not have time to consider them except in passing references. First, let us quickly end week 5—our rapid tour through the doubters and troublers of chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6—with a glance at two neo-formalists: Richard Wilbur and X. J. Kennedy.

<p><b>Week 6 starts at 9 AM (Philadelphia time) on Sunday, October 11, 2020, and ends at 9 AM on Sunday, October 18, 2020.</b>For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 6 materials are open and available all year.</p><p>The so-called “New American Poetry” that emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s went in many directions; some trends, styles, and approaches overlapped, while some were (or seemed to be) more distinct and separable than others. The “Beat” poets were a fairly distinct community of writers, making it easier than it would be otherwise to study as a coherent movement their ecstatic, antic, apparently anti-poetic break with official verse culture. Our approach, in just one week, looks at two ubiquitously canonical Beats (Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac) and then quickly moves off to adjacent figures. Robert Creeley was not a Beat poet, but his most famous poem "I Know a Man" engages poetic, psychological, and social matters with which Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the others were obsessed. Bob Kaufman cherished the designation "beatnik," and certainly takes up issues of ecstatic living and social alienation in a way aligned with Ginsberg but his "Jail Poems" bespeak his embrace of multiple, simultaneous associations: imagist, itinerant, Black, Jewish, Zen surrealist, incarcerant, "abomunist." Anne Waldman is an “outrider” poet and is more closely associated with the second generation of “New York School” poets (see chapter 8), but she was a dear friend of Ginsberg and learned much from his political pedagogy. Amiri Baraka, as Leroi Jones, was a Beat poet for a few years and then broke away. The poem by Baraka that we study here gives us a chance to look back on Countee Cullen's traditionally formal poetic response to racist hatred. The prose-poem/manifesto by Baraka on how poets (should) sound extends a theme already important to this chapter: the primacy of sound (or music) as a form of freedom from linguistic convention. Jayne Cortez gives us a perfect example of this and permits us to suggest connections among the Beat aesthetic, Black Arts, the influences of jazz, and the emergence of “spoken word” performance. Our focus on Kerouac in chapter 7 is a little unusual — he, of course, is known more as a novelist than a poet. But his “babble flow” and riffing in "Old Angel Midnight" have been a significant influence on contemporary poets, more than his narrative fictional stance as psycho-social itinerant. We will have occasion, then, to examine and question Kerouac’s— and Ginsberg’s—claims to be writing naturally spontaneous language. Our chapter 9 poets for the most part doubt such a claim. </p><p><b>ASSIGNMENTS:</b> During this week there are two quizzes due (see below). There are no writing assignments due, nor peer reviews. There is a live webcast on Wednesday, October 14, at noon (Philadelphia time).</p>

<p><b>Week 7 starts at 9 AM (Philadelphia time) on Sunday, October 18, 2020 and ends at 9 AM on Sunday, October 25, 2020.</b> For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 7 materials are open and available all year.</p><p>Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch represent the first wave of New York School of poets in this week of our course. We met Anne Waldman already in chapter 7; she is deemed to be a “second generation” New York School poet. Now we add another of that second generation, Bernadette Mayer—and, in Eileen Myles, something of a third (or second-and-a-half) generation. Our super-close readings of Guest's “20” and Ashbery's “Some Trees” are intended, in part, to show that the non-narrative or anti-narrative styles of this group—and their propensity for sudden shifts in pronoun use, inconsistent imagery, and inside-the-community name dropping—nonetheless produce writing that can be interpreted line by line. During this week (a bare-minimum introduction to this playful postmodernity), we will get a bit of pastiche from Koch and one instance of O'Hara's "I-do-this-I-do-that" explorations of lunchtime, as well as examples of Ashbery's opaque lyricism, Guest's stunning memory-as-word associationalism, and Mayer’s application of O’Hara’s exuberant attention to daily details to a woman’s life and language. Hanif Abdurraqib and Patrick Rosal both respond directly to O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died." Abdurraqib adapts O'Hara's anxious, breathless rush of intense memory to merge American competitiveness and the experience of anti-Blackness. Rosal's poem begins with an ensemble-voiced, present-tense, frenetic romp through New York City, very much influenced by O’Hara’s mode and sensibility. But then the poem moves elsewhere, enacting diasporic return, and pushes the New York School style beyond its earlier categories by developing its own powerful synthesis of global concerns. </p><p><b>ASSIGNMENTS</b>: During this week there are two quizzes due (see below). There is also a writing assignment due. Writing assignment #3 can be submitted anytime between 9 AM on 10/19/20 and 9 AM on 10/25/20; after that, peer reviews will be submitted anytime between 9 AM on 10/26/20 and 9 AM on 11/1/20. There is also a live webcast on Wednesday, October 21, at 10 AM (Philadelphia time).

<p><b>AN OVERVIEW OF THE FINAL THREE WEEKS OF MODPO:</b> We spend our final three weeks surveying three related groupings of experimental poetry, covering recent decades to the present. In week 8 (chapter 9.1), we look at the so-called “Language Poetry” movement as it emerged in the San Francisco Bay area and New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. In week 9 (chapter 9.2), we turn to chance-generated and aleatory and quasi-nonintentional writing. In week 10 (chapter 9.3), we look at the emergence (or resurgence) of conceptual and unoriginal and recombinatory— supposedly "uncreative"—poetry. Several of the 9.2 poets follow directly from the innovations of the 9.1 Language poets. A few of the 9.3 conceptualists see themselves as breaking away from Language poetry and embrace a “post-avant” status, while others see a continuity from modernism through Language and aleatory writing to conceptualism. The extent to which all these poets—but especially the 9.1 and 9.2 poets—show their indebtedness to modernists such as Duchamp, Stein, Williams, and the proto-modernist Dickinson does suggest that our course is the study of a line or lineage of experimental American poetry continuing out of modernism. </p><p><b>Week 8 begins at 9 AM on Sunday, October 25, 2020 and ends at 9 AM on Sunday, November 1, 2020. </b> For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 8 materials are open and available all year.</p><p>By starting with Lyn Hejinian’s "My Life," we focus on ways in which—and reasons why—Language poets refused conventional sequential, cause-and-effect presentations of the writing self. They imply that the self is languaged — formed by and in language—and that the self as written is multiple across time (moments and eras) and thus from paratactic sentence to paratactic sentence. While this radical revision of the concept of the lyric self (and of the super-popular genre of memoir) emphasizes one aspect of the Language Poetry movement at the expense of several other important ideas and practices, it is, we feel, an excellent way to introduce the group. Bob Perelman’s “Chronic Meanings,” aside from its contribution to this introduction, also picks up a theme of our course: the experimental writer attempts to encounter death (loss, grief, absence) by somehow making the form of the writing befit that discontinuity and disruption. We began this theme in chapter 2 with Stein's “Let Us Describe” and continued it in chapter 8 with O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” and we will proceed with Jackson Mac Low's “A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore” in chapter 9.2. The Language poets' interest in rewriting and reinterpreting the rise of modernism leads us to Susan Howe's "My Emily Dickinson," a helpful return to ModPo's first week. Chapter 9.1 continues with two poems from Harryette Mullen's book of intense alphabetical and lexicographical self-consciousness, <em>Sleeping with the Dictionary.</em> Mullen's talent is diverse, and her work could have appeared in weeks 8 or 9 or 10, but it's here because we hope some readers will sense an interesting relationship between <em>Sleeping with the Dictionary</em> and Hejinian’s <em>My Life.</em> Tyrone Williams's sense of the torqued languaged self directs that consciousness toward histories of Blackness in the U.S. The work of John Keene, who wrote a prose poem memoir influenced by Hejinian's "My Life," is represented here with an experimental parallel-column text, "Persons and Places," exploring the ongoing historical near misses caused by racist and homophobic assumptions. </p><p><b>ASSIGNMENTS:</b> During this week there are two quizzes due (see below). No new writing assignment is due. Peer reviews of writing assignment #3 are due. Peer reviews should be submitted anytime between 9 AM on 10/26/20 and 9 AM on 11/1/20. There is also a live webcast on Wednesday, October 28, at 6:30 PM (Philadelphia time).</>

<p><b>Week 9 begins at 9 AM on Sunday, November 1, 2020 and ends at 9 AM on Sunday, November 8, 2020.</b> For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 9 materials are open and available all year.</p><p>When Jackson Mac Low put a body of language (for instance a poem by Gertrude Stein) through a rigorous procedure, he would say that he created (or “wrote”—in the sense of computer programming) the procedure and that the procedure then created the poem. One of his goals was to experiment with the elimination or evacuation or at least the suppression of poetic ego. In this sense his work stands alongside that of Hejinian, Bernstein, and Howe, who (by other means) sought to question the stable lyric subject that had been for so long been associated with the writing of poetry, and with imagination generally. On this point the chapter 9 poets are unified in breaking from modernism's implicit and often explicit claim of creative, a-world-in-a-poem-making genius. But otherwise the aesthetic connection between, for instance, Mac Low and Stein is strongly positive. (Please note: during our filmed discussion on Mac Low's “A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore,” Al Filreis gets a little carried away when reading a list of words made from Moore’s name; neither the word “spicer” nor the phrase “this weekend” can be derived from those letters!) </p><p><b>ASSIGNMENTS:</b> During this week there are two quizzes due (see below). There is also a writing assignment due. Writing assignment #4 should be submitted between 9 AM on 11/1/20 and 9 AM on 11/8/20; after that, peer reviews will be submitted any time between 9 AM on 11/9/20 and 9 AM on 11/15/20. There is also a live webcast on Wednesday, November 4, at 3 PM (Philadelphia time).</p>

<p><b>Week 10, our final week, begins at 9 AM (Philadelphia time) on Sunday, November 8, 2020 and ends at 9 AM on Sunday, November 15.</b> We will then have a final day (November 15-16) to wrap up and say our final words. For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 10 materials are open and available all year.</p><p>Not every artist we meet here claims to be part of a trend or movement now widely known as conceptualist poetics or uncreative writing. Some have at times embraced one or both of those terms: Christian Bok, Caroline Bergvall, Tracie Morris. Others, such as Rosmarie Waldrop, have been involved in appropriative and unoriginal practices for decades. Erica Baum is a photographer of found language who seems to thrive in the atmosphere created by the explicit conceptualists. Michael Magee is an original Flarfist, which some see as divergent from conceptualism but here at least seems certainly a cousin. Others we encounter in our final week (Jordan Abel and Tracie Morris) are using unoriginality and linguistic borrowing and “writing through” for their own reasons and are creating distinct effects. But every artist in chapter 9.3 displays an intense virtuosity that defies what most people at first expect from writings made out of such an adamant rejection of creativity. Bök's "Eunoia" is virtuosic. So is Nasser Hussain's "SKY WRI TEI NGS," which confines itself to words formed by three-letter airport codes. We hope that despite the strangeness of it all you will find pleasure in watching them undertake their hyper-concentrated, seemingly impossible projects. What can look easy in such experimentalism is often demanding in the extreme. It's hard to imagine better examples of this than "Africa(n)" or "Eunoia" or "SKY WRI TEI NGS." </p><p><b>ASSIGNMENTS:</b> During the final week of the course, there are two quizzes due (see below). Peer reviews of writing assignment #4 are also due. Peer reviews should be submitted any time between 9 AM on 11/9/20 and 9 AM on 11/15/20. There is also a webcast on Wednesday, November 11, at noon (Philadelphia time).</p>