Since this is an introductory course intended for both English majors and non-majors, I’m going to try to introduce attitudes, concepts, and skills that will make poetry accessible as an ongoing, living art form.
When we look at older poetry, we will be considering how those poems function for us in the present and how they inform the work of current poets. For example, we’ll consider one of the oldest poets, Sappho, and how her work surfaces in the work of writers working now, like Anne Carson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Harryette Mullen. (We’ll also visit with Shakespeare, Donne, Chaucer, Wordsworth and of course Emily Dickinson.)
We’ll also be looking at a wide range of kinds of poetry, so that you can get a sense of just how broad the idea of a poem can be. We’ll look at picture poems of writers Kurt Schwitters, Guillaume Appolinaire, and Christian Morgenstern. We’ll look at visual poetry—poetry which doesn’t make a picture but which relies heavily on the shape of the poem for meaning—by writers like George Herbert, Charles Olson, and Susan Howe. And we’ll listen to sound poetry by writers like Hugo Ball and Joseph Beuys.
And we’ll consider so-called “popular” forms of poetry that tend to emphasize the speaking voice and the active engagement of listeners. For this class, that will primarily mean the work of Beat writers and recent slam poets.
And of course we’ll consider quite a lot of contemporary free verse, but, when we do, I’ll emphasize how those works create their own formal rules, how “free” isn’t entirely free. We’ll be spending time with Charles Simic, Jorie Graham, and Louise Glück, among others who are more eclectic, such as the Flarf poets.
Overall, the goal of the course will be to confront what I see as the main impediments to appreciating and enjoying poetry:
- The aura or mystique of poetry that suggests that it is “above” or “beyond” the average reader.
- The fact that poetry is often more interested in form than content, or, put another way, the form is the content, the interest in the matter that makes the message.
- The interest many poets have in multiplying possible meanings rather than being clear or simple.
- The rather specialized vocabulary that has accumulated to name features of poems that are, if we pause to consider them, familiar to us from the everyday language all around us.
- The tendency of poetry to allude to other texts (other poems, history, art, and so on). Frankly, this is the toughest one of the bunch because it takes time to build up all those associations. But we’ll talk about how to manage this difficulty.
The texts I plan to use at present are:
- Western Wind, a somewhat old-fashioned but very useful text because it introduces concepts chapter-by-chapter and spends a great deal of time on examples.
- Recyclopedia by Harryette Mullen, a funny, sharp-witted and quite incisive contemporary poet whose work relies heavily upon the sound of language, which is one of my own particular interests.
- A variety of texts from the Internet and the library collection that I’ll share via Blackboard.
Overall, I hope to make the class fun and instructive. To that end, our assignments will be something like this:
- Frequent, small analytical assignments that will ask you to apply one simple idea to a particular poem
- Creative projects that ask you to imitate a particular type of poem or try to apply a particular poetic device.
- Frequent quizzes intended to focus your reading. I’ll give some dry-run quizzes to let you see what I expect.
- And a final exam that will ask you to: recall some specific, important poems; define some of the more important concepts we learned; and apply some of those concepts to a choice of poems I’ll give you.
