Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)

Description

From Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present, ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary American poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse. Participants (who do not need any prior poetry experience) will learn how to read poems that are ostensibly "difficult." We read and discuss the poems one by one. It's much simpler than it appears! Join us and give it a shot!

ModPo is open all year, so you can join us now or at any time. Every year, we host a lively, interactive 10-week session in which we work through the ten-week syllabus together. The next live 10-week ModPo session will begin on September 4, 2021, and end on November 15, 2021. Al Filreis will contact you via email before the course begins on September 4 with all of the information you'll need to participate. If you have any questions, please contact the ModPo team at [email protected] at any time. ModPo's website, modpo.org, contains a wealth of additional information.

You will be guided through poems, video discussions of each poem, and community discussions of each poem over the course of ten weeks. In addition, (unlike other open online courses), we provide weekly interactive live webcasts. Our well-known TAs also hold office hours throughout the week. We assist in the organisation of meet-ups and on-site study groups.

If you're interested in learning more about the ModPo team, type "ModPo YouTube introduction" into Google or your preferred search engine and watch the 20-minute introductory video. You will be given an overview of the course and introduced to the brilliant TAs who will be encountering the poems with you all the way through.

Syllabus :

1. chapter 1.1 (week 1)—Whitman & Dickinson, two proto-modernists

• watch an introduction to week 
• watch video on Emily Dickinson's "I dwell in Possibility"
• watch video on Dickinson's "Tell all the truth but tell it slant"
• watch further discussion on "Tell all the truth"
• watch video on Emily Dickinson's "The Brain within its Groove" (part 1)
• watch video on Emily Dickinson's "The Brain within its Groove" (part 2)
• watch the CANON CHALLENGE for week 
• watch video on Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" (part 1)
• watch video on Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself” (part 2)
• watch video on canto 47 of "Song of Myself"
• watch discussion of Divya Victor's "W is for Walt Whitman's Soul"
• (alt.) watch abridged video on Victor's "W is for Walt..."
• watch Divya Victor discuss "W is for Walt Whitman's Soul"
• watch video discussion of the Whitmanian and Dickinsonian modes

 

2. chapter 1.2 (week 2)—Whitmanians & Dickinsonians

• watch an introduction to week 
• watch video on William Carlos Williams’s “Smell!”
• watch video on William Carlos Williams's "Danse Russe"
• watch video on Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California"
• watch video on Lorine Niedecker's "Grandfather Advised Me"
• watch video on Lorine Niedecker's "You are my friend"
• watch video on Lorine Niedecker's "Foreclosure"
• watch the CANON CHALLENGE for week 
• watch video on Cid Corman's "It isnt for want"
• watch video on Rae Armantrout's "The Way"
• watch video on distinctions between “Dickinsonian” and “Whitmanian” proto-modernism

 

3. (A) chapter 2.1 (week 3)—the rise of poetic modernism: imagism

• watch an introduction to week 
• watch video on H.D.'s "Sea Rose"
• watch video on Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"
• watch video on Ezra Pound's "The Encounter"
• watch further discussion on "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
• watch a discussion of Tonya Foster's haiku (with the poet)
• watch a PoemTalk discussion of Tonya Foster's haiku
• watch the CANON CHALLENGE for week 

 

(B) chapter 2.2 (week 3 cont.)—the rise of poetic modernism: Williams

• watch video on Williams's "Lines"
• watch video on Williams's "Between Walls"
• watch video on Williams’s “This Is Just to Say”
• watch video on Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow"
• watch video discussion on Duchamp’s “Fountain”
• watch video on Williams's "Portrait of a Lady"
• watch video on Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase"

 

4. (A) chapter 2.3 (week 4)—the rise of poetic modernism: Stein

• watch an introduction to week 
• watch video on Stein's "A Long Dress"
• watch further discussion on "A Long Dress"
• watch video on Stein's "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass"
• watch video on "Water Raining" and "Malachite"
• watch video on Stein's ideas about narrative, composition, repeating & nouns
• watch video on Stein's "Let Us Describe"
• watch video on Stein's "If I Told Him"
• watch the CANON CHALLENGE for week 

 

(B) chapter 2.4 (week 4 cont.)—the rise of poetic modernism: modernist edges

• watch video on Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven
• watch video on Tristan Tzara's "To Make a Dadaist Poem"
• watch video on Bishop's "A Recollection" and the sonnet in modernism

 

5.(A)  chapter 3 (week 5)—communist poets of the 1930s

• watch an introduction to week
• watch video on Ruth Lechlitner's "Lines for an Abortionist's Office"
• watch video on Genevieve Taggard's "Interior"

 

(B) chapter 4 (week 5 cont.)—the Harlem Renaissance

• watch video discussion of Cullen’s “Incident”
• watch video on McKay's "If We Must Die"
• watch video on Hughes's "Dinner Guest: Me"
• watch video on teaching Hughes’s “Dinner Guest: Me”
• watch video on Brooks’s “Boy Breaking Glass”

 

(C) chapter 5 (week 5 cont.)—Frost

• We continue ModPo week 5 with chapter 5. Robert Frost is widely considered a major modern American poet, but in fact his relationship to modernism is mostly antagonistic. In our series of short chapters featuring poets’ doubts about aspects of the modernist revolution, we consider just one poem by Frost—"Mending Wall"—for its frank but also witty way of raising the issue of subject-object relations. The speaker and a second figure find themselves on either side of a wall. Should that wall come down? Does Frost’s answer to that question have anything to do with his famous anti-modernist complaint—that free verse is “like playing tennis without a net”? We also offer a video recording of a ModPo-hosted symposium in which four poets debate Frost's wall.

 

(D) chapter 6 (week 5 cont.)—formalism of the 1950s

• watch video on Wilbur's "The Death of a Toad"
• watch further discussion of Wilbur's "The Death of a Toad"
• watch video on Kennedy’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”
• watch further discussion on Kennedy's "Nude Descending a Staircase"

 

6. chapter 7 (week 6)—breaking conformity: the beats

• watch an introduction to week 
• watch video on the first section of Ginsberg's "Howl" (part 1)
• watch video on the first section of Ginsberg's "Howl" (part 2)
• (alt.) watch abridged version of discussion of "Howl"
• watch video on Kerouac's ideas about prose
• (alternative) watch short version of video on Kerouac's ideas about prose
• on Kerouac's "Old Angel Midnight"
• (alt.) abridged version of video on Kerouac's "Old Angel Midnight"
• watch ModPo TAs debate spontaneity & first thought/best thought
• watch video: can we do a close reading of babble flow?
• watch video on Bob Kaufman's "Jail Poems"
• watch Doug Kearney & others on "Jail Poems"
• watch the CANON CHALLENGE for week 
• watch video on Creeley's "I Know a Man"
• watch video on Waldman's "Rogue State"
• watch video on Baraka's "Incident"
• watch video on Baraka's "How You Sound??"
• watch video on Jayne Cortez's "She Got He Got"

 

7. chapter 8 (week 7)—the New York School

• watch an introduction to week 
• watch discussion of O’Hara's “The Day Lady Died”
• watch video on Koch's “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams”
• watch video on Ashbery's “The Instruction Manual”
• watch further discussion of Ashbery’s “The Instruction Manual”
• watch video on Guest's “20”
• watch further discussion of Guest’s “20”
• watch video on James Schuyler's "February"
• watch video on Ashbery's "Some Trees" (part 1)
• watch video on Ashbery's "Some Trees" (part 2)
• watch video on Mayer’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”
• watch the CANON CHALLENGE for week 
• watch a discussion of Eileen Myles' "Mount St. Helens"
• watch discussion of Hanif Abdurraqib's "USAvCUBA"
• watch video on Patrick Rosal's "Uptown Ode That Ends on an Ode to the Machete" Part I
• watch video on Patrick Rosal's "Uptown Ode That Ends on an Ode to the Machete" Part II
• (alt.) watch abridged discussion of Rosal's poem (20 mins.)
• watch an introduction to week

 

8. chapter 9.1 (week 8)—some trends in recent poetry: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

• watch an introduction to week 8 (12 mins.)
• optional 24-min. supplemental intro to Language poetry
• watch video on Hejinian’s My Life (part 1)
• watch video on Hejinian’s My Life (part 2)
• (alt.) watch abridged version of discussion of Hejinian's "My Life"
• watch video on Perelman’s "Chronic Meanings"
• watch video on Bernstein’s "In a Restless World Like This Is"
• watch the CANON CHALLENGE for week 
• watch video on Howe’s “My Emily Dickinson”
• watch brief video introducing Mullen's "Sleeping with the Dictionary"
• watch video on Mullen’s “Sleeping with the Dictionary”
• watch discussion of John Keene's "Persons and Places" on location

 

9. chapter 9.2 (week 9)—some trends in recent poetry: chance

• watch an introduction to week 
• watch video on Cage's "Writing through Howl"
• watch video on Cage’s adagia
• watch video on Mac Low's "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore"
• watch video on Mac Low's approach to Stein
• watch video on Osman's "Dropping Leaflets"
• watch video on Bernadette Mayer's writing experiments
• watch video on Retallack's "Not a Cage"
• watch further discussion of Retallack's "Not a Cage"

 

10. chapter 9.3 (week 10)—some trends in recent poetry: conceptualism & unoriginality

• watch an introduction to week 
• watch video on Bök’s “Eunoia”
• watch video on Baum’s “Card Catalogue” and “Dog Ear”
• watch video on Caroline Bergvall's "VIA"
• watch video on Magee’s “Pledge” & “My Angie Dickinson”
• watch the CANON CHALLENGE for week 
• watch video on Waldrop’s “Shorter American Memory”
• watch discussion of Nasser Hussain's SKY WRI TEI NGS
• (alt.) watch abridgement of Nasser Hussain discussion
• watch discussion of Jordan Abel's "The Place of Scraps"
• (alt.) watch abridged version of Jordan Abel discussion
• watch video on Tracie Morris’s “Africa(n)” & final words

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