Week 12
Readings are included in this packet.
For Monday, please read four short, experimental essays: Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale”; Brian Blanchfield, “Locus Amoenus”; Wayne Koestenbaum, “The Writer’s Obligation”; Lisa Robertson, “Time in the Codex”
In each case, identify one aspect of the text (a particular moment, a larger strategy) that you consider poetic, and be prepared to explain why in class.
Wednesday: TBD.
Week 11
Readings are included in this packet.
For Monday, we will read five poems that variously raise questions of poetry about and as architecture: Emily Dickinson, “The Props Assist the House”; Renée Gladman, from Prose Architectures; Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst”; Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of a Jar”; and Rosemary Waldrop, “A Serenade and Requiem.” Also please read the excerpt from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.
On Wednesday we will be joined by V. Mitch McEwen of the School of Architecture. Please read Audre Lorde’s “Coal” in preparation for an architectural-poetic workshop.
Week 10
Readings are included in this packet.
For Monday, we will read five poems by Lynne Sachs from her from her book Year by Year, for the years 1962, 1982, 1984, 1988, and 2006. There are also three films by Sachs to watch. Tip of My Tongue is related to the poems; watch the whole if you can, but especially 1:03:20 to the end (you’ll see a familiar face featured). Please also watch two short films, Starfish Aorta Colossus (password: LS2021) and Girl Is Presence (password: LS2021) and for the last, also have a look at the interview with Anne Lesley Selcer (especially 20:17 to 23:58).
For Wednesday, we’ll take a day to think about the definitions of poetry that have accumulated over the semester, and to add some to our repertoire. Our one poem—something of a test case for the various theories—will be Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” Our definitions will be: “Linguistics and Poetics,” by Roman Jakobson; “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” by Stanley Fish; “Blackness and Poetry,” by Fred Moten; and short accounts by John Stuart Mill, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound.
Week 9
Readings are included in this packet.
No new readings for class on Monday; for Wednesday, we turn to film, and we will read Anne Carson, “H and A Screenplay” (you can read about the story of Heloise and Abelard here), along with Frank O’Hara, “Ave Maria.” Plus: Maya Deren, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Parker Tyler, and Willard Maas, “Poetry and the Film: A Symposium,” and Viktor Shklovsky, “Poetry and Prose in Cinema.”
Week 8
Readings are included in this packet.
Monday we continue thinking about lyric and narrative, especially but not only sestinas, and we will read Elizabeth Bishop, “Sestina”; Anton Chekhov, an excerpt from from his notebooks; Mark Strand, “Chekhov: A Sestina”; and Robert Haas, “A Story about the Body.” Kirstin Valdez Quade will join us.
For Wednesday, on to dance!—with some poems about dance, and also about gesture: and excerpt from Sir John Davies’ Orchestra; Emily Dickinson, “I Cannot Dance upon My Toes”; Terence Hayes, “I Don’t Know How to Hold My Body”; James Merrill, “Charles on Fire”; Marianne Moore, “Arthur Mitchell”; and Wallace Stevens, “Life Is Motion.” We’ll also read the great and strange Vilém Flusser on gesture and affect.
Week 7
Readings are included in this packet, except where indicated below.
Monday the first essay for the courses is due; see the instructions in the packet. We’ll also read Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and a poem that influenced it, William Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper.” These two poems will let us think about the category of lyric, and an excerpt from Northrop Frye’s The Theory of Genres will give us some terms .
Wednesday we turn toward narrative, poems as (or containing) stories. We’ll read five poems, Emily Dickinson, “Because I Would Not Stop for Death”; Cathy Park Hong, “Our Jim”; John Keats, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died”; and the traditional ballad, “Oh the Wind and the Rain” (see also the recordings from week 3 below). Tzvetan Todorov’s essay “The Two Principles of Narrative” will help us answer the question, what is narrative, anyway?
Week Six:
Readings are included in this packet, except where indicated below.
For Monday, we’ll talk about essay writing by way of one of the poems from our readings that we have so far missed discussing; you can vote here.
The readings for Wednesday are set for us by out visitor, the playwright Nathan Davis: the last scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and a short performance by Saul Williams, “Coded Language.”
Week Five:
All readings are in this packet, except where indicated below.
For Monday, in addition to the exercise, read the excerpt from Hart Crane’s The Bridge and have a look at a few of Walker Evans’ photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge (here, here, here, here, and here).
The readings for Wednesday are longer than usual, owing to the selection from Shakespeare’s Othello, so be sure to make time. Our emphasis will fall there, but the other, shorter poems offer some alternative versions of drama in poetry: reading aloud (Felicia Hemans’ “Casabianca,” which was a classic of classroom recitation, and Elizabeth Bishop’s poem of the same name), and dramatic monologue (Robert Browning, “His Last Duchess”). There is also a short reading on “Performance” as a category, by Henry Sayre.
Week Four:
All readings are in this packet except where indicated below.
For Monday, in addition to the exercise, read Elizabeth Alexander, “Letter: Blues”; Marilyn Chin, “Blues on Yellow”; John Hollander, “Blue Wine”; Maggie Nelson, from Bluets; and Wallace Stevens, “Of the Surface of Things.” (We won’t discuss these poems, but they will hopefully afford us a general atmosphere of blue in which to work.)
For Wednesday, we turn to photography, and we will read John Ashbery, “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers”; David Ferry, “Plate 134” (see image here); Barbara Guest, “Photographs”; Seamus Heaney, “The Grauballe Man”; and Ben Lerner, “The Voice.” You can look at the photographs from which Heaney originally worked (and glean some of the anthropological background) from looking at this excerpt from P. V. Glob’s The Bog People. Also please read the excerpts from Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, and
Thierry de Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox.”
Week Three:
For Monday, in addition to the exercise, listen to (and in some cases view) the following works: Dmitri Tymoczko, Prophetiae Sibyllarum; Thomas Morley, April is in my Mistress’ Face; three settings of the weird old song “Oh the Wind and the Rain,” by Crooked Still, Jerry Garcia & David Grisman, and Nico Muhly, along with Alfred Deller singing Shakespeare’s “Hey Ho, the Wind and the Rain“; Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues; Coleman Barks reciting Rumi, Christian Bök reciting “And Sometimes,” and Allen Ginsberg reading at Royal Albert Hall 1965. Some of the texts are in the packet for the week.
Speaking of that packet, on Wednesday, we turn to the visual arts: please read W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” (see image here); Homer, the shield of Achilles (from the Iliad); John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; Yusef Komunyakaa, “Blackamoors, Villa La Petra” (see images here); Marianne Moore, “Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish” (see image here); plus excerpts from Horace, Ars Poetica; Gotthold Lessing, Laocöon; W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other”; and Plato, The Republic.
Week Two:
Monday, we will complement our discussion of scheme, on Wednesday, with a seminar on trope. The readings (collected in this packet) are: Anne Carson, “Merry Christmas from Hegel”; Emily Dickinson, “I Heard a Fly Buzz”; John Donne, “The Funeral”; H.D., “Sea Rose”; and Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin”; plus excerpts from: Aristotle, Poetics;
Harry Berger, Jr., Figures of a Changing World; and Allen Grossman, Summa Lyrica. Tuesday, we get under way with the first of our neighbor arts, music. Please read from the same packet: John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”; Shigeru Matsui, “Pure Poems”; John Milton, “At a Solemn Music”; Tracy K. Smith, “Wade in the Water”; and Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”; plus excerpts from: Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding, Alien Listening; John Hollander, “The Music of Poetry”; Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons ; andArthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. No exercise is set for this week.
Week One:
We will begin, on Monday, with a miscellaneous assortment of arguably poetic fragments against which to test our intuitions. For Wednesday, we will consider the broad category of poetic scheme, formal and rhetorical arrangements of language, including meter. Readings are collected in the weekly packet and include: Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 1; Sternhold and Hopkins, Psalm 24; William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30; Emily Dickinson, “Much Madness”; Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird”; William Butler Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”; Colleen Thibaudeau, “Candle” and “Dump Truck”; Cathy Park Hong, “Market Forces Are Brighter than the Sun,” as well as excerpts from Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form; Nicolas Abrams, Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis; Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pleasure and Pain of Words; Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms.
