exemplary set:
Arnold's "Dover Beach" (handout) & H.D.'s "Oread" (Pratt 64)

"Introduction" to The Imagist Poem (Pratt 19-44)

Imagist Manifestos:
Pound, "A Retrospect," including "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" (March 1913)
Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character (to p. 18)

T. E. Hulme's poems (Pratt 47-49), with an emphasis on "Autumn"
H.D.'s "Hermes of the Ways" (67-68)

post: Choose one of the three principles Pound's "A Retrospect" gives for poetic composition, then test it against H.D.'s "Hermes of the Ways." What did Pound see in this poem that made him offer it as the example of what the Imagists wanted to accomplish?

Fenollosa (& Pound), The Chinese Written Character

Pound's "translations" from the Chinese (handout):
"The Beautiful Toilet": translations by Pound, Giles, & Waley
"The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" (Pratt 62)
interpretations of "The River Merchant's Wife"
other translations of "The River Merchant's Wife"

Pound's Imagism:
"The Return" (56)
"In a Station of the Metro" (54) and its history & interpretations
"The Jewel Stairs' Grievance" (60)
& other early Imagist poems by Pound (54-62)

posts: Is it possible to read Pound's poems as ideograms like "boat-water" or "sun-and-moon"? In your paragraph, take a concept from The Chinese Written Character and use it to think about the following Pound poem:
1) "The Return" (Biro through Garms)
2) "In a Station" (Koos through Pecora)
3) "Jewel Stairs' Grievance" (Polansky through Thiesse)

post

H.D., Imagiste
H.D.'s poems (64-73), with an emphasis on "Orchard," "Heat," "Storm," and "Sea Rose"
online poems: Sheltered Garden & Sea Poppies

On H.D.'s life & work
On H.D.'s poems from imagist volume Sea Garden

post: 1) What qualities in H.D.'s work made it exemplary of the best of Imagism? How does it illuminate the points in Pound's "Don'ts"? Does it go beyond them? If so, how? If not, why not? 2) The signature H.D. is purposefully androgynous. Does it matter to your reading to know that she was a woman?

Amygisme:
Amy Lowell, essays & poems (Pratt 99-102)
The Amygistes: Aldington (76-81 [especially "Images"), Fletcher (103-05), Flint (50-53)
On Lowell, Pound, and Imagism

Post: take up the voice of an opinionated reviewer--say Pound or Arnold--and write for or against one of the poems by the person in question. Be partisan! Speak for your group of poet-politicians.

post:
Aldington
Fletcher
Lowell

World War I
Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (handout)
World War I Image Archive

Vorticism:
Pound, materials from Gaudier-Brzeska & Blast
Lewis, "Long Live the Vortex!" (1914)
return to Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" from the point of view of Vorticism

post: think about the relationship between Imagism, Amygism, and Vorticism through one of the following two questions:
1) How do the images from the WWI image archive help to explain Pound's tone in BLAST and in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley"?
2) What is the difference between an "Image" and a "Vortex"?

Imagism's aftermath: Sandburg and Stevens
Sandburg, Imagist poems (114-16) & "Chicago," "Halsted Street Car," "Child of the Romans," "Prairie Waters by Night," "Cool Tombs," & Grass" (handout)
Stevens' poems (122-29), especially "Domination of Black," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and "Anecdote of a Jar"

post:
1) compare Aldington's "Images" (80-81) and Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (125-27), OR
2) pick one poem by Sandburg and juxtapose it with an Imagist poem: what differences and similarities do you find?

Imagism's aftermath: Williams
"thing poems": "Red Wheelbarrow," "Locust Tree," "The Bull," and "Nantucket" (83-84) plus "Poem" (handout)
other Williams poems (Pratt 82-94)
The Great Figure
"The Yachts" (handout)
& J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship

Post: 1) Discuss "The Red Wheelbarrow" or "Nantucket"--how do these poems approach "the thing"? Would Pound approve?, OR 2) compare Sandburg's "A Fence" and Williams's "The Yachts": if in Imagism, images work toward revelation, how in Imagism's aftermath do images do the work of social commentary?

REVIEW OF IMAGISM : bring questions, theories, and critiques

transition: Oppen's "Psalm" (SP 36)

proposal for paper

Objectivist principles :
Oppen, "The Mind's Own Place" (SP 173-82)
Oppen, Interview (1968) (handout)

Introductions to Oppen:
Robert Creeley "Introduction" to Selected Poems (SP ix-xvi)
Oppen's life and career

"Image of the Engine" (8-11)
critics on Image of the Engine

prologue to Discrete Series (SP 3-4)

draft of
paper 1

The Materials (1962): "Eclogue" (SP 7), "Image of the Engine" (8), "Leviathan" (30)

This in Which (1965): "Psalm" (36), "The Forms of Love" (handout), "The Occurrences" (handout), "A Narrative" (72-78), "World, World--" (80)

"Of Being Numerous" (SP 83-110) & "Route," section 5 (handout)
on In Alsace

listen to Oppen read his poems here

Lorine Niedecker:
New Goose (CW 92-136), with emphasis on "granite pail " (96), "There's a better shine" (101), "Well, spring" (107)
For Paul and Other Poems (CW 137-177), with an emphasis on "In the great snowfall" (142), "What horror" (142), "Old Mother" (149), "Dead" (150), "I rose from marsh mud" (170)

Niedecker entry in Dictionary of Literary Biography & Niedecker pages
Pemberthy introduction, "Life and Writing" (Collected Works 1-11)

required post: Observing that Oppen's poems give us a rhetoric of thinking, Robert Creeley says, "It is as if one listens to his thinking, the slowly secured phrases." Listen to Niedecker thinking, then write a post on the movement of this thought in one of the poems in the assigned reading.

"Poet's Work" (194), "I married" (228), and"My Life by Water" (237-38)
"Paean to Place" (261-69)

interpretations of "Paean to Place"

post on "Paean to Place": launch your post from a claim made in the interpretations on the MAPS website then move into one section of the poem to make your own interpretations

"Paean to Place" (261-69)
"Wintergreen Ridge" (247-57)

Penberthy, "A little too little: Re-Reading Lorine Niedecker"

REVIEW OF OBJECTIVIST MOVEMENT: bring questions, theories, and critiques (& also Oppen and Niedecker volumes)

preparation for midterm: bring Imagist/Objectivist questions, summaries, and comments

post

Hejinian, My Life (all)
Hejinian, "Strangeness" (Artifice 140-54)

required post: "The sentences keep reappearing," Bob Perelman writes in his essay on the "new sentence," "juxtaposed against different sentences" (34-35). Describe the effect of this repetition by looking at two or three recurrences of one of the earmarked italicized sentences in My Life.

conclusion of My Life
read Watten, "Total Syntax: The Work in the World" (Artiface 49-69)

Watten, Bad History (1998), sections D, E, & F
Wikipedia on Conceptual Art

required post: Among many other things, Watten's term "bad history" points to "a concept of event which does not measure up to its canons of evidence" (vii). For Watten, art in general--and poetics in particular--functions as a corrective to "bad history," but how does it do so? Discuss one of the art pieces below as a comment on "bad history."

Michal Rovner Decoy #1 (cover)
Johnson's postmodern office building at 580 California Street
Joseph Kosuth's conceptual piece Idea, What Does It Mean, or Nothing
Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View
Chris Burden 747
Michael Landy, Vulture (subdivision of Scrapheap Services)
Seyed Alavi, Blueprint for the Times

REVIEW OF LANGUAGE MOVEMENT: bring questions, theories, and critiques

required post: what questions do you have about the language movement? what is your sense of its strengths and weaknesses as a project for poetry? how effective is it--or can it be--as a political project? does it offer alternatives to conventional feminism and/or anti-war politics?

language
imitation

post

Transition:

The New York School:
-- Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems
-- Frank O'Hara's manifesto for Personism

LeRoi Jones' Beat period (Baraka Reader 1-17)
--poems from Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
--"How You Sound?"

Black Arts exemplary set:
O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died" (25) & Baraka, "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS" (BR 71-73)
interpretations of "BLACK DADA"
Baraka, Sweet--Black Dada Nihilismus, with New York Art Quartet

Baraka, "An Agony. As Now." (52-53)
About Baraka

required post: Baraka dedicates "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS" to, among others, Tambo, Willie Best, W. E. B. DuBois, Patrice Lumumba, Jack Johnson, Tonto, Buckwheat, Billie Holiday, and Denmark Vesey. Pick one of these figures, do some research to discover who that person was, and think about why this poem would be dedicated to him or her.

historical overviews:
return to Berkeley: The Black Panthers
Baraka, "The Black Arts (Harlem, Politics, Search for a New Life" (BR 367-99)
The Black Arts Movement
documents (Karenga, Baraka, Fuller, & Neal)

Baraka, from Blues People (21-50)
--"African Slaves/American Slaves: Their Music"
--"Swing--From Verb to Noun"

sound files:
King Oliver's Creole Band, Chimes Blues
Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, Heebie Jeebies
Duke Ellington, Diminduendo in Blue
Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit
Coltrane, My Favorite Things

Poems from The Dead Lecturer (51-74), with emphasis on "An Agony. As Now," "Rhythm & Blues," and "Political Poem"

proposal paper 2

manifestos:
"SOS" & "Black Art" (BR 218-19)
--interpretations of Baraka's Black Art
"State/meant" (BR 169-70)

poems from Black Magic (210-224), especially "A POEM SOME PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO UNDERSTAND," "Letter to E. Franklin Frazier," and "Black People!"

post-Dead Lecturer book jackets

post

Baraka, Dutchman (BR 76-99)
Ch. 1, W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk

required post: According to DuBois, Blacks who live in a majority white culture are marked by "a double consciousness" or "two-ness" that results from the clash between one's sense of oneself and one's sense of others' sense of oneself. It could be argued that Dutchman is Baraka's rendition of the anguish it is to always look at oneself through the eyes of others, to "measure one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." For this post, then, write a paragraph that considers the interplay between Clay and Lula's sense of him, Clay and the subway riders' sense of him, or Clay and the reader's sense of him. In your response, point to specific scenes that give Baraka's audience access to Clay's split consciousness or sense of "two-ness."

draft for
paper 2

Aloud: poems by reggie cabico, maggie estep, tracie morris, hal sirowitz, bob holman, patricia smith, lisa buscani, gary glazner, and marc smith

sounds:
Maggie Estep, Sex Goddess of the Western World
Marc Smith, For the Little Guy
Patricia Smith, Undertaker
Tracie Morris, Project Princess & On 'n On
Lisa Buscami, A Prayer
Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

websites: Poetry Slam Inc. and Marc Smith's Slampapi.com

in class: cuts from SlamNation (video)

required post: Unlike all the other movements we've studied, slam is for the ear, not the eye, the stage not the page. For this post, select one of the assigned poems for which we have sound and describe the ways in which the words are shaped for speech. What aspects of the poem create its appeal to the ear?

Holman and Algarin, Introduction to Aloud
Poetry of the 1990s (Aloud 173-294)

required post: choose a poem from the 1990s section of Aloud that could only have been written in the 1990s and discuss its relation to the culture of the 1990s. Use your post to prepare to present the poem in class.

post

poets from Slam (handout)
poets from Aloud
--read widely to find the poem you will imitate

Slam (video)

REVIEW OF SLAM : bring questions, theories, and critiques