Dr. Alex E. Blazer	Course Site	Syllabus
First Day Questionnaire	Online Books	Selected Reading
Poetry Reading Strategies	In Class Activities	Discussion Board Response
Exam	Short Paper	Annotated Bibliography
	Research Paper

Assignments

"Constantly risking absurdity"

English 382-75: Contemporary Poetry in English

Fall 2005, MW 4:00-5:15PM, Davidson Hall 303

First Day Questionnaire

I would greatly appreciate it if you would complete the following questionnaire in Blackboard > Assignments > Questionnaire by Tuesday, August 23. This survey is completely optional. I simply want to get a sense of the class's poetic interests, and this questionnaire will give you practice with Blackboard if you need it.

 

1. What is your name?

2. If it is not apparent from the roster, how do you pronounce your name?

3. Do you prefer to be called something other than the name which appears on the roster?

4. What is and/or what are your favorite work(s) of literature (play, film, television show, novel, or short story)?

5. What is your favorite poem, poet, and/or poetic movement?

 

6. What is your prior experience with poetry?

Online Books

Books listed on the syllabus as "online" (except Bernstein's Dark City, see below) are available on the Chadwyck-Healey Twentieth-Century American Poetry individual literature collection through the article database Literature Online on the UofL Libraries' website.

• To access this database on campus, go to UofL Libraries > All Databases A-Z > L > Literature Online > Individual Collections > Twentieth-Century American Poetry > Complete Contents. Once browsing the Complete Contents page, scroll down to look for the author and book for which you are searching.
• To access this database off campus, go to UofL Libraries > Connect from Home. Browse back to UofL Libraries and follow the links for on campus access.

Bernstein's Dark City will be available in a few weeks in Blackboard > Course Documents and on reserve at Ekstrom Library.

 

If you would rather have an actual book, you may independently order these books from a bookstore. Full publication information, including ISBNs, are available here:

• Bell, The Book of the Dead Man
• Bernstein, Dark City
• Creeley, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945-1975
• Dorn, Gunslinger
• Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
• Graham, Region of Unlikeness
• Rich, The Dream of a Common Language
• Sexton, The Complete Poems

Selected Reading

Literary Biography

You are required to read the poets' Contemporary Authors literary biographies available in Blackboard > Course Documents.

Selected Poems

You are required to read the complete volume of poetry for Dorn, Hejinian, and Dahlen since these are book-length poems. You should read the complete volume of poetry for every other poet in the course, excluding Creeley's complete works; however, you are only required to read the selected poems listed below. To prepare for class, I suggest you read the selected poems at least three times: first aloud, second while taking notes on and asking questions of the poems, and third for preliminary meaning and theme. It would also be advisable to keep a reading journal.

• Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
  • [In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see]
  • [The poet's eye obscenely seeing]
  • [Sometime during eternity]
  • [Constantly risking absurdity]
  • "I Am Waiting"
  • "Autobiography"
  • "Dog"
  • [Away above a harborful]
  • [The world is a beautiful place]
  • [sweet and various the woodlark]
• Dorn, Gunslinger
  • Read the entire book.
• Sexton, All My Pretty Ones and other poems [in The Complete Poems]
  • "Said the Poet to the Analyst"
  • "The Truth the Dead Know"
  • "All My Pretty Ones"
  • "The Starry Night"
  • "The Operation"
  • "The Abortion"
  • "The Black Art"
  • "Wanting to Die"
  • "The Other"
  • "The Silence"
  • "Baby Picture"
  • "The Poet of Ignorance"
• Rich, The Dream of a Common Language
  • "Power"
  • "Splittings"
  • "To a Poet"
  • "Cartographies of Silence"
  • "Twenty-One Love Poems" (read the entire sonnet sequence)
  • "Not Somewhere Else, but Here"
  • "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff"
  • "A Woman Dead in Her Forties"
• Creeley, Words [in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945-1975]
  • "The Rhythm"
  • "The Rocks"
  • "Waiting"
  • "For Leslie"
  • "I"
  • "Walking"
  • "The Language"
  • "Hello"
  • "The Pattern""
  • "'I Keep to Myself Such Measures . . .'"
  • "The Dream"
  • "Anger"
  • "Distance"
  • "The World"
  • "Words"
  • "The Hole"
  • "Joy"
  • "Enough"
  • "Here"
  • "Intervals"
• O'Hara, Lunch Poems
  • "A Step Away from Them"
  • "Poem" [Instant coffee with slightly sour cream]
  • "Three Airs"
  • "Naphtha"
  • "Personal Poem"
  • "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul"
  • "Rhapsody"
  • "How to Get There"
  • "Ave Maria"
  • "Steps"
• Bell, The Book of the Dead Man
  • #1 / About the Dead Man
  • #3 / About the Beginnings of the Dead Man
  • #5 / About the Dead Man and Pain
  • #10 / About the Dead Man and His Poetry
  • #14 / About the Dead Man and Government
  • #17 / About the Dead Man and Dreams
  • #18 / The Dead Man's Advice
  • #23 / About the Dead Man and His Masks
  • #27 / About the Dead Man and The Book of the Dead Man
  • #33 / About the Dead Man and a Parallel Universe
• Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
  • "Forties Flick"
  • "Sheherazade"
  • "Grand Galop"
  • "Hop o' My Thumb"
  • "Mixed Feelings"
  • "The One Thing That Can Save America"
  • "No Way of Knowing"
  • "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"
• Bernstein, Dark City
  • "The Lives of the Toll Takers"
  • "Emotions of Normal People"
  • "Debris of Shock / Shock of Debris"
  • "Reveal Codes"
• Hejinian, My Life
  • Read the entire book.
• Dahlen, A Reading (11-17)
  • Read the entire book.
• Graham, Region of Unlikeness
  • "Fission"
  • "From the New World"
  • "History"
  • "Chaos"
  • "The Marriage"
  • "Holy Shroud"
  • "Spring"
  • "What Is Called Thinking"

Strategies for Reading, Analyzing, and Writing about Poetry

Reading

• As Mark Strand wrote, slow down for poetry! Reading poetry isn't the same as reading a magazine or a newspaper article; nor is it reading a textbook. Poetry is literature, which requires a psychologically aware mind capable of engaging the most primordial of feelings and affects above and beyond a rational and argumentative faculty capable of digesting facts and reasoned argument. Moreoever, poetry is composed of the most concentrated and charged language (as Blake asserted in another context, it's the world in a grain of sand); consequently, meticulous and rigorous analysis are needed to to unpack poetry's multivalences.
• Read the poem aloud. Let the sound and meter—the feel of the words and how they relate to one another—guide you to an understanding of the overall structure of the poem. The feel of the poem—whether the sounds of the words are fine or coarse, whether the beat is fluid or staccato—will attune you to the voice of the poem, and sometimes even the inner voice of the poet behind the poem.
• Read the poem more than once. You absolutely cannot digest a poem, let alone understand it, the first time you read it. First, read aloud for sound and structure, then read for narrative or train of mind, then read it again . . . for the ambiguities and the resonances of the language and of the poetically dwelling psyche.
• Don't just highlight; actively take notes: pose questions, compose tentative theories, offer preliminary interpretations in the margins. Your annotations, if you're truly reading the poem and reading it well, should enter into a dialogue with the poem, with the world view of the poem, if not the mind of the poet.

Analyzing

• Speaker and Tone: Who's speaking to whom? The speaker isn't necessarily the poet, and she's not necessarily speaking to you the reader. For instance, is the poem a dramatic monologue (a poem written from the standpoint of a character talking or writing to another character, as in a play), an elegy (a poem eulogizing a person's death, sometimes addressing the dead herself), a lyric or ode (a poem meditating on and working through a subject), or a narrative (a poem that tells a story)? What is the speaker's tone, her attitude and feelings toward the subject-matter? What is the poem's tone, it's atmosphere and mood?
• Diction: Why and how does the poet choose her words? Pay attention to diction, that is, word choice. Is it elevated and overtly poetic? Or is it formal, informal, or somewhere in the middle? Diction correlates with the subject position and/or state of mind of the speaker and/or poet. Know the denotations of the words (look them up in the dictionary if you don't know them), but also be aware of the connotation of the words, that is, the implied personal and cultural shades of meaning that reveal the poet's world view . . . as well as your own, and hence affect how you understand the poem.
• Imagery: The poem's sensational and sensory words that, in appealling to your sense of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, that make you feel as if you're in the world of the poem; they transport you there. Conversely, images can also transport you to an imaginative world, the imagination. Do the poems images take you to a real, historical world? Or do they transport you to another world, the world of the imagination or of the mind and psyche?
• Figures of Speech: Although poems can be read literally, they should not be. Rather, read even the straightest of narrative as an act of imagination, a structure of psychological conflict. Figures of speech transport you from the real world to the world of the poem, if not the psyche of the poet, through acts of the imagination. Poems, and literature in general, don't necessarily function logically with rational arguments based upon physical reality. Rather, they make comparisons using figures of speech such as similes, which use like, as, than, appears, seems, or metaphors which make direct or implied associations, sometimes extending throughout the entire poem as in extended or controlling metaphor. Sometimes the poem compares the nonhuman with the human (personification); sometimes the poem addresses the absent or nonhuman (apostrophe). Sometimes the point is made through hyperbole (exaggerated overstatement) or litotes (exaggerated understatement). Sometimes the literal part is substituted for the whole or vice versa, as in the synechdoches of wagging tongues or behind bars; and sometimes the substitution operates through close association as in the metonymy of the silver screen. What truly necessitates that the poem cannot be read literally, but must be read imaginatively and psychologically are paradoxes (self-contradictory statements that upon closer or alternate means of reflection resolve themselves) and oxymorons (the pairing of contradictory words as in silent scream), for those two figures of speech transfer you from the world of straight logic to world of the multiplicitous and ambivalent, the poetic world of thought that stands powerfully equal to but radically divergent from the world of logic and reason.
• Symbols: Symbol are the literal object or images themselves, but they also open up to potential meanings beyond themselves, meanings which may be either conventional—public, cultural, tradition—or literary and contextual to the particular poet or poem. Symbols are another key to theme and meaning for in analyzing them you must move from the world of the poem to the world view, the vision, of the poet. Archetypes, universal or transcultural symbols, signify patterns of human experience especially in myth, folk and fairy tales, and religious cycles. Archetypes can also be thought of as relating the basic structures of human meaning, as in our conception of time (nature's seasonal cycle), of morality (the archetypal characters of hero and villain), and of narrative (the journey of ordeal, quest, and initiation). Although archetypes can be used for understanding the deep structure or symbolic principle of the poem, don't lose sight of individual and cultural meaning: think of the mind of the poem as varying, playing with, re-imagining, and re-creating the archetypal content for its own vision.
• Irony: Irony is the contrast between appearance and reality, expectation and truth. Situational irony occurs when an expectation of what will or does occur conflicts with what really happens; verbal irony occurs when what is said conflicts with what is meant, as in sarcasm for example; dramatic irony occurs when the reader knows more than the character or speaker. What a poem or poet says isn't necessarily what it or she means; poems, or at least those complex and authentically engaged in multifaceted and many-voiced world views, often subvert their own meanings. Therefore, rather than reading a poem as having a straight and simplistic, singular and univocal theme, an awareness of irony compels the reader to internalize the ambivalences and conflicts of the poetic vision and meaning.
• Sound and Rhyme: Poetry was originally part of an oral tradition (and to a certain extent still is); as such sound and rhyme patterns made poems entertaining, helped them to be memorized, and gave a rather open-ended form closure. Look for the ordered repetition of certain sounds as you're determing how the poem should be read and what words and meanings are significant. Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sounds at the beginnings of words. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds; consonance, the repetition of consonant sounds. Look for rhyme, two or more words or phrases that repeat the same sounds, as a structuring mechanism. End rhyme is at end of lines; internal rhyme is within the line. Single or masculine rhyme is single-syllable end-rhyme while double or feminine rhyme is composed of a stressed syllable then unstressed syllable at the end of the line. Exact rhyme uses the same sounds. Near (also known as off, slant, or approximate) rhyme use almost, but not exactly, the same sounds.
• A word of advice: Use the definitions of sound and rhyme above as well as those of rhythm, meter, and form below only inasmuch as they help you to break down and then interpret the poem; don't sacrifice an investigation into meaning for obsession with outer form. Form may follow content, but an exclusive analysis of form will ring hollow.
• Rhythm and Meter: Rhythm, the patterned and recurring timed movement or beat, constitutes another structuring principle that affects and shapes emphasis and thereby meaning. For example, sing-songy nursery rhymes require drastically different rhythms from funeral dirges. The rhythm of the poem is based on line length ( long versus short lines), line endings (end-stopped vs run-on or enjambed lines), pauses (ceasuras, or beat-stops within the line), spaces (textual gaps within lines), and word and sound choice. Meter is the measurement of the regular beat or pattern of stresses and/or syllables. Prosody is the type of meter; scansion is the act of measuring to determine the prosody. Rising meter moves from unstressed to stressed syllables while falling meter moves from from stressed to unstressed syllables. Masculine endings are lines ending on a stressed syllable while feminine endings are lines ending on an unstressed syllable. A foot os the smallest metrical unit, comprised of one stressed and one or two unstressed syllables. The most common meter is iambic pentameter, a line of five feet, in this case iambs (one unstressed then one stressed syllables).
• Form: Form is the overall structure or shape of the poem. As with sound and rhyme and rhythm and meter, form shapes reading and meaning. Be aware of form only inasmuch as it helps you understand the meaning of the poem. There are two general types of poetic form, fixed and open. Fixed forms are categorized by line and stanza (the regular grouping of lines), meter and rhyme scheme (the pattern of end rhymes). A couplet is two lines of the same rhythm and meter; a heroic couplet is rhymed iambic pentameter. A tercet is a three-line stanza; a triplet is a three-line stanza in which all the lines rhyme. Terza rima is an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme (aba); a quatrain is a four-line stanza (aabb, abba, aaba, abcb). A sonnet, etymologically "little song," is a 14-line rhyming poem in iambic pentameter. An Italian or Petrarchan sonnet is composed of an octave (abbaabba) and a sestet (cdecde, cdcdcd, or cdccdc) while an English or Shakespearean sonnet is composed of three quatrains and a couplet (ababcdcdefefgg). A villanelle is a 19- line poem comprised of 5 tercets and a concluding quatrain in which the first line is the same as lines 6, 12, and 18 (aba aba aba aba aba abaa). A sestina is a 39-line poem composed of 6 6-line stanzas and a 3-line concluding stanza called an envoy; also, the 6 end words of stanza 1 are repeated in other stanzas. An epigram is a brief, pointed, and compressed witty poem, often using sarcasm, irony, and paradox. A limerick is composed of 5 anapestic lines (aabba), in which lines 1,2, and 5 have 3 feet while lines 3 and 4 have 2 feet. A picture or concrete poem arranges its words into what they describe. A parody is a humorous imitation of a serious poem. The second general type of form is open form, often called free verse, which has no established pattern. Open form resulted from modern experiments with old forms which were deemed to constrain for an evolving, new consciousness. Two specific types of open form are prose poems and found poems. A prose poem does not use lines, but is distinct from prose because it's language is so condensed. A found poem turns found writing into poetry.

Writing

• Summarize, Analyze, Criticize: Argue the text's main theme or set of interrelated themes as you interpret them through critical thought and sound analysis. Make sure your interpretation, however particular and local in the text, correlates with and suggests the overarching meaning of the text.
• Appreciate and Interrogate: Get into the author's psyche, her world view, and present her themes on life and the world of ideas. However, don't simply accept the author's mind set at face value; pose questions to her world view. Strong reading and strong writing not only comprehend where the poet and poem are coming from, they also engage the poems with their own understanding of the world.
• Close Reading and Quoting: Go through the most significant section or sections of the poem line by line, but only insofar as it helps to prove your point. If, for instance, you're writing about a particular metaphor, symbol, or image, you don't need to do a close reading of every line; instead, just tease out and quote the most appropriate lines to prove your point. Conversely, if you're writing about shift in tone or irony, you may want to do a close reading of an entire passage in order to tease out the nuances of the meanings.
• Applying the Elements: Know how to formally analyze a poem, but always use formal critique as a means to the end of thematic investigation. Don't analyze the elements of poetry in and of themselves; show how they function to create meaning.
• Practice: Write questions and interpretations in the margins of your poems. Keep a reading journal in which you try to articulate the world views of the poets you read. For class, send web-based discussion or listservice posts that at once summarize the main themes of the poem or poet, engage in selected close readings, and pose questions for class discussion.
• Essay Exams: To write an effective essay exam, first anticipate what questions you'll be asked as you read and review your notes and the poems. Practice composing your response beforehand, for instance by preparing and memorizing an outline of each poet's/poem's main points. When writing the actual exam, note that instructors don't expect in-class essays to be polished; however, they do want you to hit the primary themes of the poems as they relate to the essay questions. Show what you know, how you think: present as many critical and analytical ideas as possible in the time allowed.

In Class Activities

1. Ed Dorn's Gunslinger: Characterizing the Road Trip

Divide into four groups to discuss the following three prompts. After approximately 25 minutes, the groups will report their analysis to the larger class.

1. Narrative: Sketch what happens in Book I? What is the purpose of the journey? Where does the narrative start and where does it end, at least in Book I?
2. Characterization: Do a character of one of Book I's two major characters, the Gunslinger or "I," that your professor assigns your group. What are the character's predominant traits? In what ways does he foil the other major character?
3. Issues and Themes: Tentatively speaking, what are some of the issues that Gunslinger broaches? What are some possible themes it's setting up and/or conveying in Book I.

2. Marvin Bell's The Book of the Dead Man: About the Dead Man and In Class Group Activities

Divide into four groups to discuss the following issues regarding the poem your group is assigned.

1. Characterization: Do a character sketch of the Dead Man. Describe the nature of his "death." What are his core conflicts and issues?
2. The Poem: What is your assigned poem about? What is the key issue of the poem?
3. The Book: What is The Book of the Dead Man about? In your current thinking, what is the theme of the collection?

• #1 / About the Dead Man
• #3 / About the Beginnings of the Dead Man
• #5 / About the Dead Man and Pain
• #10 / About the Dead Man and His Poetry

3. Charles Bernstein's Dark City: Finding the Poet among the Debris of Language

Language Poetry

 

Although John Ashbery is a postmodern poet, he nonetheless has one foot in traditional romantic lyric of self-expression. The three poets that we're reading in the next few weeks (Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Beverly Dahlen) have a far more radical, poststructuralist view of language and self. Although Ashbery influences these poets, they comprise a revolutionary tendency in postmodern poetry called Language poetry, which foregrounds anti-absorptive language over against conventional, "meaningful" poetry. The following characteristic list borrows from Bob Perelman's "Language Writing and Literary History," The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996) 11-37, available in Blackboard > Course Documents.

1. Language poetry employs a theoretically informed, poststructuralist view of the self. The self is pluralistic, multiplicitous, shifting, and conflictive, and subject to language and discourse.
2. Language poetry utilizes a new (hyper)realism that strives to portray the contemporary subject’s divided yet blase consciousness through the sheer banality of everyday language usage in all its mixed and shifting saturation.
3. Language poetry implements writing as a critical process instead of a stagnant product. Thus Language poetry is interested in overcoming the consumable goods that are traditional and conventional verse (and prose) through a poetics of a) semantic and syntactical disjunction, b) nonlinear antinarrative, c) nonreferential textuality and materiality of language itself, and d) polyvocal and polylogical expression of "speaker."
4. Language poetry is interested in readerly participation in the writing process such that the reader constructs meaning just as the writer does, thereby moving beyond the role of passive consumer and into the role of active producer of meaning.
5. Language poetry uses the four above characteristics (poststructuralist subbjectivity, hyperrealism, writing as process of critique, and reader response thereof), as a means to approach politically informed and motivated ends at the level of representation at worst and the level of mainstream political discourse at best.

Activity

 

To jump start our discussion of Bernstein today, divide into groups of three or four to discuss what "happens" in an assigned poem (either "Debris of Shock / Shock of Debris" or "Reveal Codes") as well as what the speaker-poet feels about the nature of the world and self.

1. Summarize a page or so of the poem by noting what happens, at the literal, figurative, conceptional, and/or ideological level, in each line. Note the juxtaposition of rhetorics and ideas. What do the lines and ideas have in common? What might the juxtaposition mean?
2. Note when, where, and in what context the poem uses "I," in other words, when the poet may be speaking directly. What do we learn about the poet's sense of self, his world view, and/or his subjectivity?

4. Lyn Hejinian's My Life: The Process of Meaning in "A pause, a rose, something on paper"

Autobiographical, Procedural Poetry

 

Lyn Hejinian's My Life is a book of poetry that tests the limits of autobiography, diary, memory, and identity. Each prose poem constitutes the poet's memory of a year of her life. Although the reader receives informative details of that existence, those facts are overrun by language because the poet remembers what has been through what is now, that is, the creative language of her life. The poet's multiplicitous and fluctuating identity is constructed by a language that questions reference and sublimes convention: "My life is as permeable constructedness" (93).

 

The book gains thematic continuity by repeating and recycling the titles of more than half of its poems throughout the text of subsequent poems. However, these recurring phrases are continually amended and revised, thus bringing a degree of discontituity into the heart of continuity. The titles of the first two poems and their subsequent reuse are listed below the following discussion questions.

• What do these recurring phrases tell us about the poet's relationship with language? her understanding of memory? her conception of identity?
• What happens to the reader's understanding of these phrases as they are repeated and recycled, recoded and revised? In other words, what happens to meaning?

1. A pause, a rose, something on paper
   1. A pause, a rose, something on paper, in a nature scrapbook. (13)
   2. A pause, a rose, something on paper. (16)
   3. I found myself dependent on a pause, a rose, something on paper. (21)
   4. A pause, a rose, something on paper. (31)
   5. A pause, a rose, something on paper. (36)
   6. A pause, a rose, something on paper implicit in the fragmentary text. (41)
   7. A pause, a rose, something on paper. (43)
   8. A pause, a rose, something on paper. (45)
   9. A pause, a rose, something on paper. (52)
   10. A pause, a rose, something on paper—an example of parascription. (64)
   11. A pause, a rose, something on paper of true organic spirals we have no lack. (65)
   12. A pause, a rose, something on paper. (70)
   13. There was a pause, a rose, something on paper.(75)
   14. A pause, a rose, something on paper. (80)
   15. A pause, a rose, something on paper. (86)
   16. Things are different but not separate, thoughts are discontinuous but not unmotivated (like a rose without pause). (96)
2. As for we who "love to be astonished"
   1. As for we who "love to be astonished," my heartbeats shook the bed. (22)
   2. As for we who "love to be astonished," a weasel eats twenty times as much as a lizard of the same size. (24)
   3. As for we who "love to be astonished," I'm not your maid I'm your mother. (28)
   4. As for we who "love to be astonished," mother love. (30)
   5. As for we who "love to be astonished," every Sears smells the same. (34)
   6. As for we who "love to be astonished," a moth has more flesh than a butterfly could lift. (40)
   7. As for we who "love to be astonished," you would say these are its ghosts. (41)
   8. As for we who "love to be astonished," he's a walker. (44)
   9. As for we who "love to be astonished," so do all relationships move. (45)
   10. As for we who "love to be astonished," the ear is less active than the eye. (47)
   11. As for we who "love to be astonished," the night is lit. (50)
   12. As for we who "love to be astonished," McDonalds is the world's largest purchaser of beef eyeballs. (54)
   13. As for we who "love to be astonished," each new bit of knowledge is indicative of a wider ignorance. (56)
   14. As for we who "love to be astonished," life is linked to man. (61)
   15. As for we who "love to be astonished," thicken the eggs in a bath Marie. (70)
   16. As for we who "love to be astonished," money makes money, luck makes luck. (74)
   17. As for we who "love to be astonished," the old-fashioned branching ice cream cones could hold twin pairs of scoops, of four. (77)
   18. As for we who "love to be astonished," it's more like muggy was than wooden houses. (78)
   19. As for we who "love to be astonished," my love for these kids. (83)
   20. As for we who "love to be astonished," I was territorial at their nativity. (97)
   21. As for we who "love to be astonished," consciousness is durable in poetry. (98)
   22. As for we who "love to be astonished," we lead that life because it is mulish and packed. (104)
   23. The adult son and daughter of we "who love to be astonished"...and really what other chance, conclusion, power could I...resume. (111)

Activity

 

Divide into groups of three or four and discuss the following issues in Hejinian's book of poetry. If your group would like a good poem or two to commence your analysis, I suggest looking at "A pause, a rose, something on paper" (7), "She showed the left profile, the good one" (45), "Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance" (74), or "Now such is the rhythm of cognition" (92).

1. What are some self-reflexive aphoristic statements that Hejinian makes about the poetry writing process and her identity?
2. What are some patterns and repetitions you see occurring throughout Hejinian's poetry, Hejinian's book?
3. Compare and contrast Hejinian's poetic process, meaning, and self with Bernstein's.

Discussion Board Response

You will respond to and then present to the class a poem (or, in the case of short poetry, a couple of poems; or in the case of a book length poem, a section of a poem) from our selected poetry list based on the poet you sign up for, below. You will post your response to our course discussion board: Blackboard > Assignments > Discussion Board. Typically this due date will be the Wednesday before the class discusses the poet. The response should

• be formatted in Word or Rich-Text Format (not WordPerfect, Works, or OpenOffice) according to the MLA styled template,
• be 2-3 double-spaced pages long,
• engage the poetry in meaningful ways
  • I don't want to prescribe your response. You may respond to theme, style, symbol, etc. The important thing is to dig into the poetry and develop out substantive issues.
• and include questions or issues for class discussion.

You will also be responsible to read the poem aloud (or, in the case of a book-length poem, a page or so) and present the high points of your response in an informal, 3-5 minute presentation. Approximately one week after submission, your graded response will be returned to you in Blackboard > My Grades > Discussion Board Response.

 

Week	Date	Poet	Student
Week 1	none	none	none
Week 2	none	none	none
Week 3	W, 9-7	Sexton, All My Pretty Ones [in The Complete Poems]	Tiffany LaBarbera
Week 4	W, 9-14	Rich, The Dream of a Common Language "Power," "Splittings," "To a Poet," or "Cartographies of Silence"	Eleanor Luken
		Rich, The Dream of a Common Language "Twenty-One Love Poems," "Not Somewhere Else, but Here," "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff," or "A Woman Dead in Her Forties"	Michael Black
Week 5	W, 9-21	Creeley, Words [in The Collected Poems]	Jason Schwalm
Week 6	W, 9-28	O'Hara, Lunch Poems	Lane Hibbard
		O'Hara, Lunch Poems	Nate Sturdevant
Week 7	none	none	none
Week 8	W, 10-12	Bell, The Book of the Dead Man #1 / About the Dead Man, #3 / About the Beginnings of the Dead Man, #5 / About the Dead Man and Pain, #10 / About the Dead Man and His Poetry, #14 / About the Dead Man and Government	Steven Clark
		Bell, The Book of the Dead Man #17 / About the Dead Man and Dreams, #18 / The Dead Man's Advice, #23 / About the Dead Man and His Masks, #27 / About the Dead Man and The Book of the Dead Man, #33 / About the Dead Man and a Parallel Universe	Brittany Yonts
Week 9	W, 10-19	Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror	none
Week 11	W, 10-26	Bernstein, Dark City	Michelle Smock
Week 12	W, 11-2	Hejinian, My Life [responders should not respond to the same poem]	Caleb Foss
			Lilybelle Flint
Week 13	W, 11-9	Dahlen, A Reading (11-17)	Brittany McKnight
Week 14	W, 11-16	Graham, Region of Unlikeness "Fission," "From the New World," "History," or "Chaos"	Noah Glass
		Graham, Region of Unlikeness "The Marriage," "Holy Shroud," "Spring," or "What Is Called Thinking"	Corinne Tirone
Week 15	none	none	none
Week 16	none	none	none
Week 17	none	none	none
Finals	none	none	none

Exam Review

The exam will consist of two or three essays. Each question will ask you to compare and contrast at least two poets particular themes, poetics, or views of the world. The goal of the exam is for you to show your understanding of thematic issues and literary concerns of contemporary American poetry by being able to make comparisons and contrasts among poems and poets.

 

If I were preparing for this exam, I would create and review a separate page of notes for each poet consisting of the following:

• the poet's major thematic concerns and core conflicts
• the poet's world view
• the poet's view of poetry
• the issues and themes of each poem on the selected reading list
• selected signicant quotes that represent the core conflicts and themes

Although you could simply review your original class notes, I advise composing these set of notes for doing so attunes your thinking and writing process to the cause of the exam in a much more active way than using old notes. Constructing notes is prewriting for the essay exam.

Short Paper

The exam required you to make connections and distinctions among the poets, poetry, and movements. The short paper allows you to exemplify your understanding of a single poem, or part of a poem for book-length poems. Choose a poem from a book of poetry, which we have read in class, but not a poem which we have discussed in class. For example, you could select a Ferlinghetti poem that is not listed on the selected reading. If you choose Dorn, select a couple of pages which we did not explicitly discuss in class. Write a short paper that closely reads that poem in the manner demonstrated by our discussion of Ferlinghetti's [Away above a harborful]. First, develop out the predominant and paramount issues and ambiguous and ambivalent meanings, and then conclude what the poem thematically means as a whole: resolve the ambiguities and ambivalences by choosing a side.

• Length: 4 pages
  • Your paper will be penalized one-third of a letter grade if it does not end at least halfway down on the fourth page while implementing proper font, spacing, and margins. If it does not end at least halfway down on the third page, it will be penalized two-thirds of a letter grade.
• Format: MLA style
• One-third of a letter grade will be deducted for problems in each of the following two categories: 1) margins and 2) font and line-spacing. Before you turn in a formal paper, make sure your work follows MLA style by referring to my FAQ on papers and using the checklist on the MLA style handout.
• You may turn in your paper either as a paper copy or electronically. If you submit your paper electronically, it must be formatted in either Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works, OpenOffice, or Rich-Text Format.
• Due Date
• Wednesday, November 2
• If you do not submit a paper copy to me in class, you must submit an accessible electronic copy to me in Blackboard > Assignments > Short Paper by 11:59PM Wednesday, November 2, otherwise your paper will be considered late until you submit it to Blackboard and a late penalty will be applied to your paper grade.

Reading Journal and

Annotated Bibliography

To prepare for the research paper, you will keep a reading journal of the poetry you read and compose an annotated bibliography of the scholarly research you find.

• Reading Journal: Respond to six poems that you're reading for and might analyze in your research paper.
  • Each response should be completely informal, though I need to see you develop out possible questions, issues, and themes for your research paper
  • Length: 200-250 words per response per poem.
• Annotated Bibliography: Annotate six works of criticism that you're reading for and might use in your research paper.
  • Annotate three scholarly journal articles and three books/book chapters, found through researching the University Libraries' resources.
  • Summarize the source's thesis, how it's interpreting your poet/poems, and how the source might be useful for your research paper's analysis.
  • Length: 50-100 words per annotation.
  • Format: Citations of the six sources should follow MLA style.
• Thesis Statement: After responding to the six poems and annotating the six sources, construct a thesis statement, which interprets the poet(-ry) under review, that you will use to guide your research paper.
• Format
  • You may turn in your assignment either as a paper copy or electronically. If you submit your assignment electronically, it must be formatted in either Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works, OpenOffice, or Rich-Text Format.
• Due Date
• Monday, November 28
• If you do not submit a paper copy to me in class, you must submit an accessible electronic copy to me in Blackboard > Assignments > Short Paper by 11:59PM Monday, November 28, otherwise your assignment will be considered late until you submit it to Blackboard and a late penalty will be applied to your grade.
• Grades
  • I will return assignments by December 2, either via Blackboard for electronically submitted copies and outside my office door, Bingham Humanities Bldg 335A, for paper submissions.

Research Paper

While the exam tested your ability to compare and contrast poets and movements and the short paper required you to closely read a single poem, the research paper asks you to analyze a poet's worldview through not only a number of her poems but also scholarly research. Choose a poet, either from class or a poet writing in English between 1955 and the present. The poet may not be the same poet on whom you wrote your short paper; and the poems may not be those that we discussed in class. You must be able to find approximately 8-10 scholarly journal articles, books, and/or book chapters on the poet (see the Annotated Bibliography, above). Next, read a book or two by the poet, and keep a reading journal of your reading (see the Reading Journal, above). Write a research paper that analyzes an issue or theme that runs throughout the poet's work. In the course of the paper, you should interpret approximately 3-4 poems, albeit not closely as in the short paper, and use 3-4 scholarly sources to support your examination.

• Length: 6-8 pages
• Format: MLA style
• One-third of a letter grade will be deducted for problems in each of the following two categories: 1) margins and 2) font and line-spacing. Before you turn in a formal paper, make sure your work follows MLA style by referring to my FAQ on papers and using the checklist on the MLA style handout.
• You may turn in your paper either as a paper copy or electronically. If you submit your paper electronically, it must be formatted in either Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works, OpenOffice, or Rich-Text Format.
• Due Date
• Monday, December 12
• If you do not submit a paper copy to my mailbox in Bingham Humanities Bldg 315 by 5:00PM, then you must submit an accessible electronic copy to Blackboard > Assignments > Research Paper by 11:59PM Monday, December 12, otherwise your paper will be considered late until you submit it to Blackboard and a late penalty will be applied to your paper grade. If you do not submit your paper to Blackboard by 11:59PM Wednesday, December 14, you will automatically fail the course.
• Grades, Comments, Paper Return
• You can access your course grade via Ulink or the Registrar after Thursday, December 15.
• If you would like your exam to be returned to you with comments, you must specifically ask for it to be returned to you with comments.
  • If you turned it in on paper, see me at the beginning of Spring semester.
  • If you turned it in electronically, you can retrieve it in Blackboard after Thursday, December 15. (Click here for instructions.)

Student	Poet	Book
Michael Black	Adrienne Rich	Dark Fields of the Republic
Steven Clark	Adrienne Rich	Sources
Lilybelle Flint	Adrienne Rich	Diving into the Wreck
Caleb Foss	John Ashbery	The Tennis Court Oath
Noah Glass	Jorie Graham	Materialism
Lane Hibbard	Lawrence Ferlinghetti	A Far Rockaway of the Heart
Tiffany LaBarbera	Lawrence Ferlinghetti	Open Eye, Open Heart
Eleanor Luken	Sylvia Plath	Complete Poems
Brittany McKnight
Jason Schwalm	Jorie Graham	The End of Beauty
Michelle Smock	Denise Levertov	The Jacob's Ladder or Evening Train
Nathan Sturdevant	Robert Lowell	Life Studies
Corinne Tirone	Billy Collins
Brittney Yonts	Charles Wright	The World of the Ten Thousand Things, Poems 1980-1990