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THE THIRTIES
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| Jan. 30 |
poem mix: modernist ideas of order / ideas of order in modernity (all in MAP)
Stevens, "Idea of Order at Key West," "Mozart, 1935," "Postcard," "Study of Two Pears," "Of Modern Poetry" (138-42)
Brown, "Rent Day Blues" (481-82) and "Memphis Blues" (475-76); Hughes, "The Weary Blues" (504-05) and "Backlash Blues" (524-25)
Grimke, "Fragment" (146)
Cullen, "Incident" (530) and Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow" (170) and "This is Just to Say" (191)
Pound, "Canto XLV" (218-19) & audio of Pound reading
Williams, "Proletarian Portrait," "The Yachts" (192-93)
Lola Ridge, "Stone Face" (42-43)
Browse America in the 1930s website
foundational essays:
--Adorno, "Lyric Poetry and Society," Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Radical Social Theory 20 (Summer 1974): 56-71)
--Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken: 217-51. Available online here.
Nelson, Cary. "What Happens When We Put the Left at the Center?" American Literature 66.4 (1994): 771-79. Available through Infohawk.
posts: Beginning with the poem or essay for which you are responsible, post a question or series of questions that highlight ideas of order in the group of poems and essays assigned for the day. Your aim is find productive ways to stimulate thinking about the relationships between poems, ideas about poems within poems themselves, and wider theories of poetry and/or art in the 1930s. These questions will guide our inquiry through the next three weeks.
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| Feb. 1 |
left manifestos:
Marx, Communist Manifesto(1848)
Trent and Cheyney, Poetry and Politics: Excerpts from the Introduction to An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry (1929)
Hughes, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926) and To Negro Writers (1935)
Mike Gold, Proletarian Realism (1930)
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| Feb. 6 |
Langston Hughes:
review Hughes' Poems 1921-1930, with particular emphasis on "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Negro," "Laughers," "Mother to Son,""Song to a Negro Wash-woman," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues," "Cross," "Bound No'th Blues," "Brass Spittoons," "The Cat and the Saxophone," "Mulatto," and "Militant"
Poems, 1931-40
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| Feb.
8 |
Poems, 1931-40
Moglen, "Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso." Callaloo 25.4 (2002): 1189-1205. Available through Infohawk.
Smethurst, "Adventures of a Social Poet: Langston Hughes in the 1930s," Chapter 3 of The New Red Negro. Available in Zimansky Room.
Discussant: Erica Bazemore
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| Feb. 13 |
The Great Depression:
Background: The Great Depression
poems from MAP:
Beecher, "Report to Stockholders" & "Beaufort Tides" (557-60); Fearing, "Dear Beatrix Fairfax" through "Denouement" (494-501); Funeroff, "The Man at the Factory Gate" (626-27) & "Goin Mah Own Road" (629-30); Hughes, "Come to the Waldorf-Astoria!" (1230-31); Jerome, "A Negro Mother" (372); Kalar, "Papermill" (583); Rolfe, "Season of Death" (609-10); Spector, "Wiseguy Type" (371); Taggart, "Up State--Depression Summer" & "Mill Town" (336-39); Wright, "We of the Streets" (584)
Nelson & poets of the Depression: compilation chorus (handout)
and two more poems for the Scottsboro chorus:
--Rukeyser, "The Lynchings of Jesus" (Collected Poems 25-31)
--Boyle, "A Communication to Nancy Cunard" (MAP 542-46)
Discussant: Jailyn Moreland
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| Feb. 15 |
The Case of Carl Sandburg:
excerpts from The People, Yes (1936) (handout)
audio of Sandburg reading from The People, Yes
Brian M. Reed, "Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes, Thirties Modernism, and the Problem of Bad Political Poetry." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46.2 (Summer 2004). Available online.
Tillie Olson :
Olsen, "I Want You Women Up North to Know" (MAP 652-54) and Filipe Ibarro's letter to New Masses
Mike Gold:
1930s found material poems, "Bucket of Blood" and "Report from the Dakotas" & the essay "Towards Proletarian Art" (here)
--Denning on Mike Gold + New Masses Mike Gold index (here)
--bibliography (here)
--New Masses index from 1926 (here)
Discussant: Megan Bygness |
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| Feb. 20 |
The Documentary Poem:
Reznikoff, Testimony & Holocaust (MAP 354-370)
Discussant: Tracy Stuhr
Rukeyser, U.S. 1 (CP 73-144) & "The Book of the Dead" (CP 73-111)
background for "The Book of the Dead"
House of Representatives subcommittee report |
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| Feb. 22 |
poem:
Rukeyser, "The Book of the Dead"
Pare Lorentz, The River
essays:
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Kalaidjian, Walter. "Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetics of Specific Critique: Rereading 'The Book of the Dead,'" Cultural Critique 20 (Winter 1991). Available through Infohawk.
--Lowney, "Truths of Outrage, Truths of Possibility: Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead." "How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet": The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser. Ed. Kaufman and Herzog. Copy in Z-Room.
--Thurston, Michael. "Extending the Document: Muriel Rukeyser." Chapter 4 of Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the Wars. Copy in Z-Room.
Discussant: Amy Hildreth
required post: In this post, consider Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead" as a documentary poem in conversation with the poems we've read by Gold, Olsen, and Reznikoff. Approach this assignment from any angle that interests you--political, historical, polemical, exegetical, formal or generic--but be sure to 1) attend to both parts of the phrase "documentary poem," and 2) ground your ideas in a close reading of at least one section of Rukeyser's poem.
[and an optional byway: Muriel Rukeyser's 118-page FBI file, available here ]
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| Feb. 27 |
The Spanish Civil War:
Background: Spanish Civil War
dispatches to New Masses :
Dorothy Parker, "Incredible, Fantastic . . . and True" (handout)
Barrie Stavis, "Barcelona Horror" (handout)
artists: Picasso's Guernica
poets:
Hughes, "Song of Spain" (CP 195-97), "Letter from Spain" (CP 201-02), "Postcard from Spain" (CP 202-03), and "Air Raid: Barcelona" (CP 207-09)
Rolfe, "First Love" and "Elegia" (MAP 610-14) and "City of Anguish" (handout)
Funaroff, "The Bull in the Olive Field" (MAP 627-28)
Levine, "Francisco, I'll Bring You Red Carnations" (MAP 928-31)
Taggart, "To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade" (MAP 342)
Davidman, "Snow in Madrid" & "Near Catalonia" (handout)
Rukeyser, "Mediterranean" (CP 144-51) and "Letter to the Front" (CP 239-47)
Millay, "Say that We Saw Spain Die" (MAP 329-30)
for comparison, W. H. Auden, "Spain" (1937) (teaser stanzas)
additional aural and visual materials from Jacob:
--The Clash, "Spanish Bombs" (from London Calling, 1979), with a rough translation of the Spanish chorus here
songs sung by Spanish Republicans during the war available online
The Black Order Brigade, Pierre Christin & Enki Bilal comic book (1979): information and sample pages
Discussant: Jacob Horn |
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| Mar. 1 |
more on Spanish Civil War
Rolfe, "Elegia" (MAP 611-14)
Niedecker, "1937" (handout)
Imagism, Amygism, Vorticism, & Objectivism: an overview
Pound, "In a Station of the Metro" (204) & H.D., "Oread" (MAP 233)
Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind," Anon, "Western Wind," and Oppen, "O Western Wind" (handout)
Objectivism:
Oppen, "Discrete Series" (handout)
Zukofsky, "To My Wash-stand" & "Mantis" (MAP
551-54)
Discussant: Eve Rosenbaum |
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| Mar. 6 |
Oppen, "To the Poets: To Make Much of Life" (handout)
Rakosi, "The Menage" (MAP 547-49), "A Journey Away" & "The Lobster" (handout)
Niedecker, "Paean to Place" & "Poet's Work" (MAP 536-41)
Objectivism's advocates & critics
--Perloff, "'Barbed-Wire Entanglements': The 'New American Poetry,' 1930-32." Modernism/Modernity 2.1 (1995): 145-75. Available through Infohawk.
retrospective thoughts--questions, summations--on the 1930s |
project
1 due |
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THE FIFTIES |
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| Mar. 8 |
post-WWII ideas of order: Stevens, Wilbur, Plath, Sexton, Creeley & O'Hara
Stevens, "Description without Place" (handout)
Filreis, Description without a Sense of Place (from Wallace Stevens and the Actual World)
Wilbur, "Baroque Wall-Fountain," "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," and "Advice to a Prophet" (MAP 792-96) and "Tears for the Rich" (quoted in Brunner)
Brunner, "The Notorious Example of Richard Wilbur," Chapter 1 of Cold War Poetry (in Z-Room)
Sexton, "Her Kind," "The Truth the Dead Know," & "And One for My Dame" (MAP 921-23)
Plath, "Black Rook," "The Colossus," & "Tulips" (974-75)
Nelson, Deborah. "Penetrating Privacy: Confessional Poetry, Griswold v. Connecticut, and Containment Ideology," Chapter 3 of Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (in Z-Room)
essay discussants: Stephanie Blalock and Jacob Horn
required post: In this post, mix and match the poets and approaches that compose today's reading. For example, use Deborah Nelson's approach on one of Michael Davidson's poets (O'Hara, perhaps) or Ed Brunner's approach on one of Deborah Nelson's poets (Plath, perhaps). This will involve summarizing the essayist's method of analysis then transferring it out of his or her canon to another sector of 1950s poetry. Are these methods of reading 1950s poetry portable? If so, how do they help us reopen poems that may seem closed when read as conventional mainstream or late romantic lyrics? |
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| Mar. 20 |
Davidson essay (Jacob):
Creeley's "After Lorca," "I Know a Man," "For Love," and "America" (MAP 875-78)
O'Hara's "Poem," "Today," "A Step Away from Them," "The Day Lady Died," "Why I Am Not a Painter" (MAP 827-31)
Davidson, "From Margin to Mainstream: Postwar Poetry and the Politics of Containment," American Literary History 10.2 (Summer 1998): 266-90. Available through Infohawk.
Hughes in the 1950s:
"Prelude to Our Age" through "Consider Me" (379-86)
"Montage of a Dream Deferred" (387-429)
additional jazz poets (MAP):
Kaufman, "The Biggest Fisherman," "Crootey Songo," and "No More Jazz at Alcatraz" (818-20)
Mullen, poems from Trimmings & S*Perm**K*T (1187-88)
Jones, "Listening to What the Ear Demands: Langston Hughes and His Critics." Callaloo 25.4 (2002): 1145-1175. Available through Infohawk.
Lowney, "Langston Hughes and the 'Nonsense' of Bebop," American Literature 72.2 (2000):357-83. Available through Infohawk.
Smethurst, "'Don't Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat': Langston Hughes, The Left, and the Black Arts Movement." Callaloo 25.4 (2002) / available through Infohawk
poem discussant: Marta Holliday
essay discussants: Erica Bazemore and Marta Holliday
required post: In an era in which speech was heavily policed by Cold War, consumerist, psychoanalytic, and educational discourses, jazz seemed to offer poets a zone of improvisation and release. How is a jazz poem constructed? Pick a short one. Riff on it.
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| Mar. 22 |
Hughes in 1961:
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961)
Wikipedia's definition of the dozens & bebop
audio collection: "Brilliantly outside, bebop was intimately if indirectly related to the militancy of its moment. Militancy and music were undergirded by the same social facts; the music attempted to resolve at the level of style what the militancy fought out in the streets" (Eric Lott)
Montage of a Dream Deferred,with Leonard Feather and bassist Charles Mingus
Drum Boogie, Gene Krupa and His Orchestra
Salt Peanuts, classic bebop by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker on sax, and Sid Catlett on drums (May 1945)
Ko Ko, Charlie Parker's Ri Bop Boys with Parker, Gillespie, Curly Russell on bass, Max Roach on drums (November 1945)
So What, Miles Davis Sextet (from Kind of Blue)
Freddie Freeloader, Miles Davis Sextet (from Kind of Blue)
A Night in Tunesia, Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Charlie Parker on tenor, Bud Powell on piano, Max Roach on drums, Charles Mingus on bass (recorded May 15, 1953 in Massey Hall)
Yardbird Suite, Charlie Parker Septet (with Miles Davis, Lucky Thompson, and Dodo Marmarosa)
My Favorite Things, John Coltrane on sax, McCoy Tyner on piano, Steve Davis on bass, Elvin Jones on drums (1960)
Ghosts: First Variation, sixties free jazz by Albert Ayler on sax, Gary Peacock on bass, Sunny Murray on drums (1964)
required post: pick one of the 12 sections of Ask Your Mama and read it with Hughes. Use, as your model, the technique of Red Allen or Charles Mingus "who improvise," Hughes tells Nat Hentoff, "as much as they care around what I read. Whatever they bring of themselves to the poetry is welcome to me" (see whole quotation in Jones, 1160).
optional supplemental reading (available through Infohawk):
Scanlon, "News from Heaven: Vernacular Time in Langston Hughes's Ask Your Mama," Callaloo 25.l (2002): 45 -65. (Click on Project Muse under Callaloo)
Miller, "Framing and Framed Languages in Hughes's Ask Your Mama," MELUS 17.4 (1991). Ciick on Academic Search Elite)
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| Mar. 27 |
The McCarthy Inquisition & Cold War poetry:
documents on McCarthyism
Richard Rovere, "Senator Joe McCarthy"
Arthur Miller on McCarthy
Filreis on Cold War Interpretation
Rolfe:
"After Tu Fu," "Now the Fog," "A Letter to the Denouncers," "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been," "A Poem to Delight My Friends Who Laugh at Science-Fiction," "In Praise Of," and "Little Ballad for Americans--1954" (MAP 615-19)
"Pastoral--1954" and "Letter" (handout)
--Kaladjian, "'Deeds were their last words': The Return of Edwin Rolfe," College Literature 24.3 (1997). Available through Infohawk.
McGrath:
"Against the False Magicians" (MAP 747)
Statement to HUAC
McGrath on tactical poetry
Fearing:
"Family Album" (handout)
Fearing, Preface to New and Selected Poems (1956)
Discussant: Ryan Clark |
prospectus
for project 2
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| Mar. 29 |
Adrienne Rich's early poems:
poems from A Change of World (1951) with Auden's Foreword (AR 3-5; 277-79)
poems from Diamond Cutters (1955) (AR 6-7)
Vendler, "Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds" (AR 299-310)
gender and the lyric:
DuPlessis, "'Corpses of Poesy': Some Modern Poets and Some Gender Ideologies of Lyric" (handout)
DuPlessis, "The Pink Guitar" (Artifice & Indeterminacy, 297-318)
--Ingres, The Large Bather
--Ingres, The Turkish Bath
--Man Ray, Violin d'Ingres
Rich, "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson" (AR 177-95)
essay discussants: Jailyn Moreland
and Megan Bygness
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| Apr. 3 |
poems from Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1954-62), Necessities of Life (1962-65), and Leaflets (I965-68) (AR 8-37)
Rich, "Poetry and Experience: Statement at a Poetry Reading" (1964) (AR 165)
Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" (1971) (AR 166-77)
Gelpi, "Adrienne Rich: The Poetics of Change" (1973) (AR 282-99)
Discussant: Stephanie Blalock
required post: The essays by Rich, DuPlessis, and (to some extent) Vendler posit what DuPlessis calls "the career of that struggle": a feminist attack on the gender narratives of lyric poetry executed through "the practice of anguage. The anguish of language. The anger of language." Choose one term or phrase or (at most) sentence from one of those essays and use it to access one poem from Rich's pre-1968 writing.
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THE SEVENTIES |
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| Apr. 5 |
The Mainstream, a.k.a.
--"School of Quietude": Ron Silliman's definition(& Philadelphia Inquirer review that sparked Silliman's term)
--"Official Verse Culture": Charles Bernstein's definition
exemplary poets (MAP):
Stafford, "Traveling Through the Dark" & "At the Bomb Testing Site" (729-30)
Wright, "Lying in a Hammock" & "A Blessing" (891-92)
Strand, "Where Are the Waters of Childhood?" (1007-08)
Olds, "The One Girl at the Boy's Party" (in Armantrout essay)
essays:
Armantrout, "Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity" (Artifice 287-96)
Perloff, "The Changing Face of Common Intercourse: Talk Poetry, Talk Show, and the Scene of Writing" (Artifice 77-106)
Silliman, "The Political Economy of Poetry" (Artifice 190-200)
essay discussants: Gabe Downs and Eve Rosenbaum |
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| Apr. 10 |
The War in Vietnam
background: The Vietnam War
poets (MAP):
Bly, "Counting Small-Boned Bodies" (882)
Duncan, "Up Rising" (790-91)
Ginsberg, "Wichita Vortex Sutra" (857-73)
--Ginsberg's voicing of WVS
Grahn, "Vietnamese Woman Speaking to An American Soldier" (1069-70)
Komunyakaa, "Tu Do Street," "Prisoners," and Communique" (1142-45)
Levertov, "What Were They Like?" and "Life at War" (813-14)
McGrath, "Ode for the American Dead in Asia" (749-50)
Merwin, "When the War is Over" and "The Asians Dying" (915-16)
Rich, "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children" (AR 40-43)
Watten, War=Language
Discussant: Gabe Downs
optional post: One critique of popular antiwar poetry (such as Levertov's or Bly's) is that it presumes a position of pristine distance from which one might compose transparent images of U.S. war atrocities on Vietnamese citizens without regard for the ways in which American poets were implicated in the war by their privileged position as citizens of the U.S. Another critique is that such poems naively try to counter the "pure" bureacratic language of the Department of Defense ("body counts," "collateral damage," "friendly fire," "preemptive strike") with the "pure" language of the lyric. To what extent do these critiques seem to you on or off the mark?
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| Apr. 12 |
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School
Berkeley Free Speech Movement
--in class video clips
Watten, "The Turn to Language and the 1960s," Critical Inquiry 29.1 (Fall 2002): 139-83. Available through Infohawk
rise of Conceptual Art: Smithson, Kosuth, and Nauman (Wikipedia)
poems from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E packet (handout)
McGann, Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes
Kalaidjian, "Transpersonal Poetics: Language Writing and the Historical Avant-Gardes in Postmodern Culture," American Literary History 3.2 (Summer 1991): 319-36. Available through Infohawk.
Discussant: Ben Basan |
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| Apr. 17 |
The New Sentence
poems:
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Silliman, from Ketjak (MAP 1098-1102) & "The Chinese Notebook" (1102-1120)
-- Hejinian, from My Life (handout)
-- Perelman, "China" (handout)
-- Watten, from "Plasma" (handout)
criticism:
Silliman, "The New Sentence" (handout)
Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets
controversy (Jameson v. Perelman):
--Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. Excerpted here.
--Perelman, "Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice" (Artifice 24-48)
essay discussants: Elise Cook and Michael Peter
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project 2 due |
| Apr. 19 |
Leningrad
Davidson, Hejinian, Silliman and Watten, Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union
Izenberg, "Language Poetry and Collective Life," Critical Inquiry 30 (Autumn 2003): 132-59. Available through Infohawk.
[Supplemental reading: Silliman, "The Task of the Collaborator: Watten's Leningrad," Aerial 8 (1995). ]
Discussant: Anne Haydock |
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| Apr. 24 |
Rich - the seventies and eighties
poems from Diving into the Wreck (1971-72) (AR 48-60)
poems from Dream of a Common Language (1974-77) (AR 73-90)
"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" (1975) (AR 195-203)
"Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980)
(AR 203-24)
McDonald, "'Reconstituting the World': The Poetry and Vision of Adrienne Rich" (AR 310-21)
Broumas, Review of The Dream of a Common Language (AR 322-29)
Okenberg, "'Disloyal to Civilization': The Twenty-One Love Poems of Adrienne Rich" (AR 329-42)
Altieri, "Self-Reflection as Action: The Recent Work of Adrienne Rich" (AR 342-57)
Discussants: Amy Hildreth and Ryan Clark |
abstract of project 3 due |
| Apr. 26 |
Rich - transition into the nineties
poems from A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981 (AR 91-100)
poems from Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems (1986) (AR 101-30)
poems from Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989) (AR 131-41)
poems from An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (AR 142-61)
"Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity" (1982)
"Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet" (1984)
"Notes toward a Politics of Location" (1984) / handout
"The Genesis of 'Yom Kippur 1984'" (1987)
Swarthmore College Commencement: June 1, 1992
"Introduction" to A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1995) / handout
Spiegelman, "'Driving to the Limits of the City of Words': The Poetry of Adrienne Rich" (AR 369-96)
Diehl, "'Of Woman Born': Adrienne Rich and the Feminist Sublime" (AR 402-23)
essay discussants: Elise Cook & Tracy Stuhr
encouraged post: Throughout the term, we've been reading poetry that attempts to cut against the ethos of the mainstream romantic expressivist lyric in the name of a political commitment that is felt to be objective, ethical, and community-based. Rich, like Rolfe, tries to combine the two stances, using her personal journey to model political action. Does she succeed? If so, how? If not, why not?
A more condensed formulation of this question would start with Audre Lorde's statement: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Can the traditional humanist lyric accomplish the revolutionary work Rich wants it to do?
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