Course Description

About the Course

This course will provide a general overview of several currents in twentieth century American poetry, and it will emphasize poetry written in the 1940s through the 1960s. Rather than offering a survey of a number of poets, this course will focus on the work of four poets: Mina Loy (1882-1966), Robert Lowell (1917-1977), Frank O'Hara (1922-1966), and Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970). These four poets, two men and two women, provide a chance to examine and define "modernism" and "postmodernism" while looking at continuities and discontinuities in the poems and poetics of four poets. These poets also provide an opportunity to examine the presence of traditional poetics as well as various experimental forms of poetry. Each poet raises questions about gender roles and sexuality, the social contexts and political responsibilities of poetry, and the relationship of poetry to other art forms. Our multi-media and internet assisted course will enhance your abilities to explore poems by these four poets, experience the poems with the use of related audio and visual materials, and allow you to establish a dialogue with each other and the teacher beyond the four walls of the classroom.

Mina Loy was active as both an artist and a poet. Her poems reveal the influence of her artistic training, including her use of post-impressionist painterly techniques, as well as her reaction against those techniques. The unit on Loy will examine her early experimental poetic sequence "Love Songs " and poems in Lunar Beadeker (1923) as well as the poems that she wrote between 1942 and 1949, poems that explore her views of female experience and writing. At the same time, it will juxtapose those poems with her visual art and other related art works. Loy, who was involved with various artists and art movements in London, Paris, Florence, Berlin, and New York, wrote poems that Ezra Pound described by coining the term "logopoeia," poems that reflect the dance of the intellect. This unit will include images of visual art done by Loy and images of artworks related to Loy's poems.

The second unit will look at the poetry of Robert Lowell, focusing on poems from two of his most influential texts Lord Weary's Castle (1946) and Life Studies (1959). The first of these two volumes presents Lowell's mastery of traditional poetic forms in poems that are formal, knotted, and tense. The poems in the latter volume present his radical change in poetics: these poems have a more colloquial diction, looser structure, and intensely personal subject matter, in poems that have been defined as "confessional" and that present his view of love and family relationships, as well as his views of masculine and feminine gender roles and art. Audiofiles of Lowell reading his own poems and video clips from a documentary on Lowell's life and poetry will be posted online.

The third unit will focus on the poetry of Frank O'Hara, beginning with his ekphrastic poems and then examining the poems he wrote between 1959 and 1961 to/about Vincent Warren. Finally, we will look at some of his poems about movies, the movie-going experience, and movie stars. Like other poets in the so-called "New York School" of poetry and as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, O'Hara was closely involved with the visual arts. His "I do this, I do that" poems with their personal tone, conversational syntax, and surrealistic imagery were shaped in part by his relationship with contemporary artists and his understanding of their work, as well as his ongoing interest in film and his urban experience. This unit will include images of visual art related to O'Hara's poems, as well as musical settings by Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, and Lukas Foss of poems by O'Hara and video clips from films that helped define O'Hara's movie poetics.

The final unit will focus on the work of Lorine Niedecker and her poetry written in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Her poetics, like that of Loy, focuses on female experience and relationship with nature. Unlike O'Hara's poems that focus on the interaction between the poet and the cityscape, Niedecker's poems emerge, in part, out of her solitary life in a cabin on Black Hawk Island in rural Wisconsin. Niedecker's highly condensed poetry has been described as an example of Objectivist poetry "in which the words dance together like the parts of a mechanical toy" (Jay Boggis). Like Loy, Lowell, and O'Hara, Niedecker and her poems explore the relationship between individual and society and the poet's sociopolitical context and responsibilities.

Our class will go beyond the walls and boundaries of the traditional classroom. Because the class will be internet-assisted, you will be expected to construct one webpage relating to one of the poets we read this semester. Also, each student will give two presentations during the course of the semester. In one of the presentations, you will lead the discussion of a particular aspect of the poet and poems discussed that class period; in the second, you will briefly summarize and critique a recent critical writing about the poet or poems under discussion. For both types of presentation I will expect you to provide the class with a handout or Powerpoint presentation outlining your major ideas. Also, your presentations will be much more effective if you actually talk to the class and clearly present your ideas rather than simply read from a typed manuscript. A chat room where you can interact with your classmates as well as with the teacher, a discussion board, and a message/announcement board will be available online. You will be able to post your response journals, as well as have an arena where you can discuss freely with your classmates and teacher the texts read for class. Video clips of your presentations, interviews/video clips of former students who have done research on these poets, and audiofiles of you introducing and reading poems will be posted online.

The webpage you design should have a clear design, with carefully chosen and closely related images, and it should contain the following content:

(note)

1. brief introduction of the background of the poet and poems
2. outline of your report about the poet and poems
3. guiding questions
4. relevant links with brief introduction
5. works cited or consulted

Most of our class time will be spent in discussion. I view this course as a "reader's workshop" which attempts to read the poems in diverse critical ways. I see my role in this course as that of an informed facilitator: I will offer a general format for the course but will allow you liberties in choosing the directions we will go. Together we can work out our exact reading assignments and calendar.

Grading Policy

You have the option of writing two medium sized papers or one longer paper (20-30 pages); you also will be required to give two presentations, create a webpage, and post online responses to your reading, respond to your classmates's journals, join online chats, and record an introduction and reading of two poems.Course grades will be based on the paper(s) (50%) as well as the quality of presentations and participation in discussions (30%) and webpages and online materials (20%).