American Poetry - Spring 2005 - Prof. Steve Evans

Reading Syllabus • Subject to Change • go to current week

Key: NCAP = Nineteenth-Century American Poetry; MAP=Anthology of Modern American Poetry; TCAP=Twentieth-Century American Poetics

Handout Contents: Section 24 of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," "America" by Claude McKay, "Shine, Perishing Republic" by Robinson Jeffers, "Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes, "A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg

January 13 Handout from Tuesday, Emerson (NCAP), Thoreau (NCAP)

Log Impressions gleaned from the handout and Emerson poems. America as normative ideal and actual fact. Celebration and critique. Whitman's contradictons and the status of poetic thought as a critique of reason. Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Different approaches to lexis in Whitman and Emerson. Common language and elevated language. The demotic and the poetic. Poems propose a world and populate it. They also adopt one or more mode(s) of address. Audiotext of "A Supermarket in California" and discussion. Cold war America, the nuclear family, the suburbs, and the supermarket. Dissident genealogies: Whitman to Lorca to Ginsberg. Student voicing of "Song of Myself" and discussion. "Through me forbidden voices...." For Tuesday, begin to pay attention to stressed (s) and unstressed (w) syllables in the poetic line.

Web resources: Terminology Anaphora and apostrophe and lexis | Context Web of American Transcendentalism | Supplemental Reading Plain text of Emerson's "The Poet" | Annotated text of "The Poet" | Site devoted to Thoreau | Listening RealPlayer file of Ginsberg's "Supermarket in California"

Log Line and stanza. The "scissoring" movement of sentence and line (Donald Wesling's metaphor). End-stopped lines and enjambed lines. Lexical stress and metrical beat. Three, four, and five beat lines. Free verse. Two passages from Emerson's "The Poet" (1844). Poet as sayer. Expression no less "primary" than action ("Homer's words are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's victories are to Agamemnon"). A poetics of discovery, not invention or even self-expression ("poetry was all written before time was"). Jack Spicer's poet as radio, with the self as static in the channel. "I look in vain for the poet whom I describe." Whitman's big break. Emerson's entitled critique of entitlement. Opening lines of "Hamatreya." Projecting a spiritual totality of which all partake equally everywhere. The numinous. Transcendentalism and abolitionism. Remarks on Longfellow, and Poe's critique of Longfellow. Melancholy (Longfellow) and morbidity (Poe). Discussion of "The Warning, "The Golden Mile-Stone," "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport," and, very briefly, "The Rhyme of Sir Christopher." Metrically regular moralizing. Poe's transgressions and innovations. Drug addict, gambler, pedophile. First modernist? The French love of Poe: Baudelaire and Mallarmé.

Web resources: On Meter Al Filreis's quick introduction to rhythm and meter; Timothy Steele's introduction to meter and form; the Interactive Tutorial on Rhythm Analysis (more detailed and technical descriptions); and some suggestions for teaching students to recognize lexical stress | Authors Project Gutenberg pages for Longfellow and Poe

January 20 — Snow Day Class Cancelled

Poetry reading: Peter Gizzi & Elizabeth Willis, 4:30PM, DPC 117

Log Fond memories of the snow day. Voicing and close analysis of three poems by Poe: "Silence," "The Conqueror Worm," and "The Raven." The fetish syllable "—or—". Doubling, twinning, and pairing in "Silence." The gothic double. Caesura and the example of the French alexandrine. That elf. The conceptual work in a Poe poem. Echoes of Shakespeare in "The Conqueror Worm." Worms can be fanged? Worm/vermin. Aside on Ken Russel's Lair of the White Worm. The mime (speechless and white), the gore (violent and red), and the audience of angels already weeping before the curtain has even been raised. Hearing "The Raven" as a young person; rereading it again now. Object permanence and loss. Poe's modernity in his relationship to irresolvable uncertainty and the absence of a vouchsafing God.

Web resources An excellent Whitman site where among other things you can hear the brief audiotext of Whitman reading that wouldn't play in class. And a Poe webliography. I've also added the National Poetry Almanac to our homepage.

January 27 Whitman (NCAP; focus on "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "Years of the Modern," and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed")

Log In lieu of a quiz, a game. Each student selects four lines from any poem in NCAP by Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Poe, or Whitman. Recitation of lines before class. Discussion of lexical, thematic, metrical, and other cues as to authorship. One or more revoicing of lines. Decisions and rationales. Why the passage was chosen. Revelation. • Whitman's distinctive devices: unrhymed and non-metrical lines, the catalog, the ellipsis, the apostrophe to the reader. • Whitmanians and Dickinsonians. Dissemination and displacement (Whitman) versus condensation and precision (Dickinson). • Discussion of Whitman with special reference to "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." Death as individuating/isolating (in Poe) and socializing/bonding (in Whitman). The Civil War and the project of adhesion. Donald Pease's claim that class solidarity in 1855 edition gives way to homoeroticism in 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Recorded absent Marc, Courtney, Tom, Kirsten

Log Death in Whitman and in Poe (review). The "you" in Whitman and in Dickinson. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Whitman's emphatic concept of democracy as reciprocal recognition of each by each. The politics and erotics of Whitmanic democracy. Projecting a future from a moment of intense crisis. Intersubjectivity. Whitmanic "merge," Dickinsonian "emergency." The master/slave dialectic in Dickinson. Discussion of #185 ("'Faith' is a fine invention"), #435 ("Much Madness is Divinest Sense") and #258 ("There's a certain Slant of light"). Secular critic of religious illusion? Or believer? The page as a canvas. Her dashes. Web resource Whitman, Dickinson, and the Civil War. Recorded absent Marc, Dan, Todd, Jessica

February 3 Dickinson (NCAP, focus on poems #556, 613, 657, 754, 709, 997, 1090; MAP)

Log Review of Tuesday's lecture. Discussion of Dickinson poems chosen by students, including #632 ("The Brain—is wider than then Sky"), #652 ("A prison gets to be a friend"), #656 ("The name—of it—is 'Autumn'—"), #709 ("Publication—is the auction"), #1090 ("I am afraid to own a Body"). Mind/body. Addressing the world in the mode of "ownership." Dickinson's critique of the terms of publication. How poetry enters the world. Flattening uniformity of print. The fascicles and the scholarly argument for their importance as units of "publication." Web Resources Michele Ierardi's tracing of the publication history of poems in fascicle 16. Poet Susan Howe's syllabus for a Dickinson course at SUNY Buffalo. Recorded absent Dan

February 10 Stein, Frost, Dunbar-Nelson, Sandburg (MAP); Stein, Frost (TCAP)

No class meeting — but be sure to do the reading.

Log Audtiotexts of "Midnight Special" performed by Odetta, "Go Down Moses" performed by Louis Armstrong, and "Long Gone" performed by Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. Vis-à-vis Johnson's "Black and Unknown Bards." On poetry and song more generally. Focus for the day: Audiotext of Wallace Stevens reading "The Idea of Order at Key West," prefaced by remarks on poetry and painting. The status of truth in poetry: between mere subjectivity and pure objectivity. Stevens and the "supreme fiction." Decreation and demystification. Artists Paul Cezanne and Paul Klee: the intensity of their vision. Emerson's "The Poet" and Dickinson's "Much madness is divinest sense." From the priest (interpreter of transcendental term) to the poet (resolver of human-scaled truths). The ambition of the moderns (Stevens, Stein, Pound, others). And the contradictions it entailed. A world in rapid transition. Changing experience of temporality (see Stein's "Composition as Explanation"). "Idea of Order": subject (she) and substance/reality (sea). Song, mimicry, and masks. The emergence of the aesthetic. Poiesis (Grk. for making). The given and the made. On linguistic sounds and non-linguistic noises. The "world" of the song. Framing stanzas: the speaker and "Ramon Fernandez" witness (somehow) this scene of world making, and are transformed by it? Compare to "Anecdote of the Jar."

Prompt for first paper —Select a poem (or substantial passage from a long poem) from those we've read in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry and subject it to close analysis. Some questions to ask yourself as you work include: What is the poem's claim on our attention? What themes does it broach? To what end? Who populates the world the poet has proposed? What lexis does the poem employ? What formal devices does it use? Do rhythmical or metrical patterns factor into the meaning-making process? How are line breaks handled? Are there references or allusions to socio-historical conditions that the reader needs to be aware of? Does the poem link to others we've read? Format Using a 10- or 12-point font, single spacing, no paragraphing, and minimal margins, fill as much of a single side of standard 8.5x11 paper with your analysis as you can. Due in class on February 22

February 17 Williams, Pound (MAP); Williams, Pound (TCAP)

Log Pound "A Retrospect" (TCAP). Precepts for modernists. Audiofile of Williams; remarks on modern poetry, art, the poetry reading. "The Visit" (audiotext and handout), "Spring and All" (MAP), and "This Is Just to Say" (MAP). Pound's career. Early lyrics. Cantos. Voicing of Canto 1.

February 24 Eliot (MAP); Eliot (TCAP)

Spring Break February 25-March 13

Log Voicing and interpretation of first section of "The Wasteland." Catalog of dramatic personae and poetic devices. Intertextuality and the relation of part (citation) to whole (text cited). Again the question of literacy arises. Pedagogical strategies: would you teach "The Waste Land" in a high school classroom? Positions pro and con. Issues of authority. Changes to the curriculum. "The thought of what American would be like if the classics, etc."

March 17 Jerome, Wheelwright, Freeman, Trent, Bogan, Crosby (MAP); Bogan (TCAP)

Log On Lyn Hejinian. • Review of expectations for remaining short papers. Discussion of rubric. • Students making the case for poems assigned for 15 and 17 March. • Millay, her candle. • e.e. cummings, his grasshopper. And his "etcetera." • Audiotext of Dorothy Parker's "Résumé." Oh no, "she sounds like T.S. Eliot." Period styles of poetic voice. • • "The Wiseguy Style." • Charles Reznikoff and the Objectivist poets (Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen). The premise of "Testimony." Legal documents as source material (found poems). Minimal aesthetic or moral framing. • Claude McKay. Looking ahead to the negritude poets of the post-WW2 period. Intellectual accompaniment to decolonization in Africa and desegregation in the US. Back to "If We Must Die." The political situation circa 1918-1919. Race riots. Churchill's later appropriation of the poem (scroll to bottom of this page). • The case against Harry Crosby (and visual poetry more generally), courtesy of Todd.

Assignment due today Post to the First Class folder a provisional table of contents page for your anthology project based on our readings to date. • Voicing and interpretation of the "Proem" to Hart Crane's long poem The Bridge.

March 24 Tolson (MAP)

Log Presentation of Kirsten Tindall's dvd linking Poe's "Silence" to images of the Holocaust. Framing and interpretation. Discerning the "teachable." The messages you want to send, those you do not. What will the "bad" student make of it? Strategies for handling potentially controversial materials. • Voicing and discussion of of Crane's "Chaplinesque."

Log Voicing and analysis of Tolson's "Dark Symphony." Followed by his own performance of final two sections. • Short history of Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and Black Arts Movement in the 1960s-1970s. Tolson, Jay Wright, and Nathaniel Mackey. Amiri Baraka. • Discussion of Kenneth Fearing's work, focusing on "2.50." Critical conscious, cynical conscious. Don't be naive. A "noir" poetics.

March 31 Hughes, Bontemps, Bennett, Cullen, Niedecker, Boyle, Rakosi, Laluah, Zukofsky, Beecher (MAP); Hughes, Zukofsky (TCAP)

Second paper due at start of class. Thousand word analysis of a poem of your choice from the Nelson anthology (beginning to Crane, inclusive). Format can be that of first assignment or standard academic paper style.

Log A lecture in memory of Robert Creeley (1926-2005).

What to prepare I will return to Langston Hughes (on the syllabus for 31 March) and begin a discussion of the Objectivists (Niedecker, Rakosi, Zukofsky, Rexroth, and Oppen) that will carry over to Thursday.

April 7 Olson, Funaroff, Bishop, Everson, Olsen (MAP); Olson (TCAP)

What to prepare Wrap up Objectivist poets; focus on Olson and Bishop.

What to prepare I will lecture briefly on the Objectivists, including Rukeyser in the discussion. I will also discuss Olson (as originally planned for 7 April). Please read Hayden's work carefully.

April 14 Concentration Camp Haiku, Stafford, Jarrell, Davidman, Walker, Stone, McGrath, Lowell (MAP); Jarrell (TCAP)

Third paper due at start of class. Thousand word analysis of a poem of your choice from the Nelson anthology (Crane to end). Format can be that of first assignment or standard academic paper style.

April 21 Spicer (handout), O’Hara, Merrill, Ginsberg, Creeley, Bly (MAP); O’Hara, Creeley (TCAP)

(Stand in for) Fourth paper due at start of class: First draft or fairly detailed outline of anthology introduction.

April 28 Snyder, Corso, Knight, Plath, Dumas, Baraka, Momaday, Strand, Lorde (MAP)

Deadline for submission of final project, Tuesday, 3 May 2005 • No extensions beyond this date are possible, so plan accordingly.