9/4/07 whirlwind tour, part 2

put up before hand: <http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/nude2.html>, <http://www.freshwidow.com/nudedescending.html>, http://www.iwu.edu/~wchapman/ampoetry/periods.html

Questions about syllabus, microessay, map?

warning about an upcoming bottleneck:

• next Friday, the first draft of the map is due. But the reading for the day is the heaviest of any day this term: an essay by Emerson, "The Poet," about 15 pages of fairly dense and somewhat archaic prose, a short Emerson poem, and then Whitman's "Song of Myself," at 44 pages by far the longest poem that we'll read this semester and not especially easy.
• You should have a reading day on Wednesday--I'll do everything I can to protect that time. But one day is not going to be enough. To be caught up, you MUST get ahead early next week, or better yet starting over the weekend after you have finished the microessay.
• three possibilities:
  • start the map early. That's going to be tough with so little material to work with so far, but if you have an idea, it would be great to get started on it.
  • get ahead in the reading by reading "The Poet" or "Song of Myself" or both early
  • get ahead in the reading, but staying in order (reading the poems on the syllabus for T andTh).
  • all of these approaches have their merits; decide for yourself which works best for you.

So far, we've moved through roughly a hundred and fifty years of American Poetry. We started in the late 1600's with the Puritans, noting a number of things that get taken up by later poets, including the plain style, a pattern of looking to Nature for signs of God's will, and a vision of America as an example for the world. We jumped ahead to the late 1700's to sample a poem from the Early National period. Our central issue here was America's growing cultural nationalism. We then moved to the 19th C, noting that there is a mainstream 19th C poetic tradition exemplified by the Fireside poets, and a handful of poets who are breaking away from that mainstream tradition to chart new directions for American poetry. We've looked at poems by two Fireside poets, Bryant and Longfellow, concentrating on their comforting and uplifting visions of life.

A note on the period designations:

As I said last time, period designations in American literature are messy. If you look in, say, Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms, and some anthologies, you'll see the traditional designations listed in the top left. One problem with these designations is that they are Anglocentric, which is why our current Norton splits the periods differently and avoids giving period names. For our purposes, both periodizations have problems. For trying to construct a mental map, having names is a great help, so I would prefer to avoid the neutrality of the Norton approach. Both designations have problems with dates, mainly having to do with the fact that we are studying poetry rather than American literature in general. Splitting the periods at 1700 doesn't work very well with poetry, because it means splitting the Puritans in half. The Realism and Naturalism periods are almost exclusively fiction, and anyway 1865, despite its immense importance historically, is a pretty arbitrary date in poetry becauseWhitman and Dickinson and to a lesser extent the Fireside poets wrote on both sides of that date.

In class, then, I will mainly be referring to the modified period designations in the bottom left, and for the purposes of attaining "breadth" in your maps you should make sure that you discuss poets in all five periods (not necessarily equally). But I also want to acknowledge that this approach has limitations--I'll say more about that at the end of the tour, when I talk about what we didn't cover.

In turning to Whitman, let us note something about every poem that we've read: it is traditional, metrically regular verse. "Huswifery" is iambic pentameter in ABABCC stanzas; "Rights of Man" is in heroic couplets; "To a Waterfowl" is in ABAB stanzas, with 3-5-5-3 feet lines; "Psalm of Life" is in trochaic tetrameter in ABAB stanzas. (645 for an example).

In Walt Whitman's "Facing West from California's Shores" (1.1057), we have this: [read]

• We will analyze Whitman's verse lines later in the class, but for now, how is the sound of it different?
• Who is speaking? If it doesn't make sense for a single individual to be saying what the speaker is saying, who or what else could he or she be speaking for? What is he or she seeking? Why is it yet unfound?

Our other major innovator: Emily Dickinson, 1263 (1.1221 or 2.93).

• what isn't exactly changed: verse form. Not free verse, but common meter. She stretches the rhythms of the common meter a good deal in some poems, but it's there.
• What is original, however, is her use of language and her thinking.
• what would it mean to tell the truth "slant," and why would that be necessary?
• What kind of truth would "dazzle" so much that it blinds people?

BREAK

The Modernist Period (1914-1939)

To set ourselves up for the modernist movement, let's think about how things would have seemed in the early 20th C. First, there WAS a substantial American poetic tradition--which is not something you could have said at the beginning of the 18th C. But it would have looked pretty tame to an ambitious- early-20th C poet. Whitman was not yet widely accepted; an edition of Dickinson had been published--only a handful of her poems had been in her lifetime--but only in an edition that regularized her language and verse forms to bring them in line with late 19th C norms. Poe had long been discredited as the "jingle-man," in Emerson's words, and wouldn't be understood by Americans until they rediscovered him by way of French Symbolism. The dominant verse of the end of the century was what has been called the genteel tradition, represented by major literary magazines of the era: Scribner's, Century. "The Psalm of Life" and "To a Waterfowl" fit right into that tradition, but they're better than average poems. To get the full effect of what the Modernists are about to reject, let's take a look at something more typical: "The Heroic Age," "To the Milkweed."

Characteristics of the genteel tradition:

• decorum: protection of the standards of the middle class family. No sex, no controversy, nothing gloomy, nothing difficult.
• decorum in other senses as well: emphasis on craft, workmanship, as exemplified by fairly conservative forms. Poetic diction
• idealism, in several senses of the word: intense optimism, belief in progress, perfectability, purposefulness. Belief that the purpose of art is to express the highest ethical standards (and therefore must represent an idealized world).
• in sum, an American Victorianism--only more repressive, in that we never had a Aesthetes and Decadents movement.

Stein poem: something has changed.

What changed? pretty much everything. In the period shortly before or during the Modern era, the following took place:

• World War I, then called the great war: the first mechanized war, the first propaganda war, the first war in which civilians were considered legitimate targets, in general a war which seemed to challenge the core values of European civilization.
• In technology: the rise of photography, movies, telephones, airplanes, mass production.
• In science: Freudian pyschology and Einsteinian physics.
• Social changes and upheavals: Chicago Race Riots, Prohibition, Women's Suffrage.
• In art: various kinds of post-impressionism, including fauvism, cubism, a little later surrealism

Since post-impressionist art, and especially cubism, is of particular imporantance to our representative modernist poem, let's look at it more closely. The first major influx of post-impressionist art came to American in the Armory show, 1913. One of the most famous (or notorious) pieces in it was Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase:
<http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/nude2.html>

• example of cubism:
  • abstract; not all elements of the painting representational; attention to elements of painting (lines, planes, etc.) for their own sake rather than for the sake of what they represent
  • planes broken up--idea is to emulate perception unclarified by reconstruction of memory
    • lurking example of movies: discontinuous frames put together by persistence of vision
    • the immediate predecessor: Eadward Muybridge's photographic motion studies, <http://www.freshwidow.com/nudedescending.html>
  • centrally, then, attention to perception and consciousness in themselves rather than what is presented to them
• "Nude" immediately attacked in mainstream press: rude descending a staircase, explosion in a lumberyard, etc.
• but seen by a younger generation in a very different light: as liberation from the stifling formality, decorousness, and hypocrisy of the dominant artisitic traditions of the day.

What does all of this indicate for us as we move into the 20th C?

• an era in which the accepted patterns of life are perceived to have broken down.
• a literature in which change itself is a major value; in which, because accepted ways of seeing and doing things have broken down, artists experiment vigorously, perhaps even a little desperately, with new forms. Ezra Pound: "Make it new"
• authors for whom a sense of tradition has changed. Many left America, with varying degrees of revulsion for the U.S.: expatriates: Pound, Eliot, H.D., not looking back to American poetic traditions so much as European traditions. Others stayed home (Stevens, Moore, Williams) but were self-consciously trying to forge a new American poetic, distinct in kind from the genteel tradition.

on reading poems:

• end-stopped lines/enjambed lines. [show with 1 in "Blackbird."] Most good readers do not pause at the ends of enjambed lines unless there is something unusual going on with the poem's lines. This means that you have to be looking ahead.
• There is a temptation, especially with traditional verse in regular meters, to maintain a kind of "reciting rhythm." [show with "Psalm of Life."] But the best readers are those who change the rhythm and intonation of the poem to suit the idea. Reciting poetry is a kind of acting; you have to get inside the character and the thought.
• practice 2-3 times

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (328-330)

• is this a cubist poem? (LOOKING at a blackbird).
  • abstract; not all elements of the painting representational; attention to elements of painting (lines, planes, etc.) for their own sake rather than for the sake of what they represent
  • planes broken up--idea is to emulate perception unclarified by reconstruction of memory
  • centrally, then, attention to perception and consciousness in themselves rather than what is presented to them
• what is the blackbird? Is it a symbol? Is it just an image?
• why thirteen?
• read a few sections closely: 5, 7, 8, 11

Harlem Renaissance (1917-1929)

Within the modern era lies another era of note: the Harlem Renaissance. Although as we'll see later in the course, there have been African American poets since the early national period, it is really only in the 20th C, with its massive increase in black populations in urban areas and in some ways less oppressive conditions, that African American poetry really takes off. The era in which this took place is commonly called the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem Renaissance poetry is both part of and distinct from modernist poetry generally: it is experimental, but it tends to have a much more coherent social agenda than the run of modernist poetry as a whole.

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (477):

• experimental, but not in the same way that "Blackbird" is: jazz poetry (read it)
• why rivers? why these particular rivers in these particular times and places?

[dates:

• rise of photography and motion pictures: Kodak box camera 1888; first motion picture camera 1895; film starting to become major genre by early to mid-1900's; by 1912, estimated 5 million Americans per day see movies
• wireless telegraph in 1891, Marconi's radio in 1895, first regular radio programs in U.S. 1921 (by 1924, 2.5 Million radios in U.S.)
• telephone service in early 1900's; NY-London service in 1926
• flight: Wright Bros. first flight in 1905, Zeppelin era from 1920 on

• Freudian psychology (Interpretation of Dreams 1900, lectured in New England and Canada in 1909)
• Rutherford's theory of atomic structure 1911, proton discovered 1914, Einstein's theory of relativity 1915

• mass production: Ford organized Motor Co. in 1905, General Motors established 1908, Ford assembly line 1913
• Chicago Race Riots 1919
• Prohibition 1919
• perhaps most importantly, the Women's suffrage movement: Seneca Falls Convention, first women's rights convention, in 1848; Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote 1920; 7 decades of generally increasing struggle]

BREAK

The Contemporary Period (1939-present)

What happened after modernism? The whole question of what it means to write American verse changes. There is no question, after the modernist era, but that America had a poetry of its own which was both distinctive and distinguished. The cultural inferiority complex that had led so many American poets from the Colonial period up into the Modernist age to define themselves against America's lack of culture, largely disappears. That's not to say that there weren't poets who were critical of America and its culture--there certainly were--but as a rule poets stop being so critical of American poetry. Moreover, there's a lot more poetry being written--the cultural apparatus to support it is there in a way that it never had been before. So what happens is a proliferation and a fragmentation of American poetry into different schools. There are a lot of aspects of American poetry to develop, and different poets do. Among the different schools are the following:

• Southern Fugitives: Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate: followers of Eliot (especially crit)
• Beats: Allen Ginsburg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
• New York School: John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara. We started with one of them.
• confessional poets: John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell
• Minnesota cluster: Robert Bly, James Wright
• Black Mountain Poets: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan
• poets evolving out of or in tandem with 60's political movements:
  • Black poets such as Amiri Baraka, Gwendlyn Brooks, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange,
  • feminists such as Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, and Muriel Ruykeyser.
• LANGUAGE poets: Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Diane Ward
• lots of poets, including some of the major ones, that don't fit neatly into schools: Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, etc.

There's no way to "represent" such a diverse period fairly. What we'll do in this class is follow two trends. One trend is an increasing concern with history. As I said, there was a lot of poetry that arose out of historical events, especially in the 1960's, and even in much of the poetry that was not explicitly attached to social or political movements much attention is paid to the larger social and historical context. For example, Sylvia Plath, whom we'll meet later in the course, is considered a confessional poet--she talks openly about extremely personal events in her own life. But her poetry is filled with references to the Holocaust and other historical events.

As an example of this trend, we'll look at Michael Harper's "American History" (2.1555)

• historical events: 1963 bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church. Was probably targeted because that church was used as a meeting place for civil rights leaders such as MLK and Ralph Abernathy. (The prime culprit was at first acquitted, then later found guilty in 1977.)
• "middle passage" refers to the slave trade--the "middle passage" was the voyage from Africa to the colonies. I have not been able to find a specific reference to slaves being held underwater in a net, but I think that the time period referred to is the War of 1812, during which British officers were given orders to recruit slaves into the navy by offering them freedom. Tens of thousands of slaves escaped to the British during this period.
• What's the connection between the two historical events? What does the last line mean?

The other trend we'll follow into the contemporary period goes in somewhat of the opposite direction. Think back to the modernist's concern with attention and perception and the elements of poetry such as language in their own right. That concern with things of the mind persists into the contemporary era. In some kinds of poetry, and even more in some kinds of fiction, this goes so far as to become a profound skepticism that anything in language can ever really connect with the world at all, or do anything but refer to other artifacts of language--this is perhaps post-modernism's central feature. The poet we're looking at today, doesn't go that far in my opinion. But she is very centrally concerned with how the mind knows things, and she's very aware of both modernist and postmodernist ways of seeing the world.

Jorie Graham, "The Geese" (2.1626-1627)

• what's associated with geese? with spiders? [get all the phrases on the board]
• what does each represent?
• does the speaker choose between them? What's at stake in choosing between them?

This concludes our whirlwind tour. Obviously, covering 300-plus years of poetry in two days, we have left out a lot--nearly everything. My goal here is not to "cover" these periods, but rather to give you a mental framework to hang things on as we go along. I strongly recommend that you try to keep track of where you are historically as we go along--that's one of the reasons why I recommend that you read the headnotes on the different authors; they'll help you place the poets we're reading within this framework.

I also want to go back to the "reservations" I mentioned about using this framework. I said then that the traditional period designations are Anglocentric. So is this class. We do have a thread on African-American poetry, but we are not even touching upon the wealth of poetry by Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanic Americans. This is obviously a huge loss, and if you are interested in any of these, I encourage you to read what's available in our anthology and work it into your map.