MLS 589 Syllabus 2014

The Poetry of Earth How Science and Poetry Come Together from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Ernesto Cardenal’s Cosmic Canticle MLS 589 - Spring 2015 Steve Phelan (photo by Arthur Jones) Course Description: You’ve heard of science fiction. This course is all about science poetry. It will illustrate the few, but substantial poets, who in the tradition established by Lucretius two millennia ago, have created a new language and way of thinking, representing the human endeavor in the context of the whole earth and the cosmos, using our full and growing knowledge of the universe. Science poetry, then, often stands in contrast with the song of creation (as represented in the mythology of all cultures) and yet it also seems to work in consonance with it. While every poem creates its own place and hence implies its own creation account, Whitman’s masterpiece sets out to create a new Book of Genesis. Leaves of Grass sets the cosmic stage for all the poetry of the Americas and the democracy he imagined would engender the new world. So powerful was his song of creation that many poets to follow, in both North and South America, took heart and followed his grand score, creating ever new oracular voices of the indigenous spirit of the Americas. This course will explore the scientific, religious, and mythological basis of Whitman’s own creation and move forward to modern and contemporary poets of his kind: William Carlos Williams, our finest imagist poet, also wrote a long poem, Paterson, which uses collage techniques to create a modernist epic of place. His book, In the American Grain, provides many of the untold stories in American history. Pablo Neruda, Nobel laureate of Chile, celebrates the simplest of objects and their spiritual depths, writes passionate love poems, and captures the strength of the native traditions in his longer poems: The Heights of Macchu Picchu and Canto General. A. R. Ammons, lyric poet of the back yard and country walks, plumbs the inner workings of biology and mind in our contemporary world. A thorough student of the laws of thermodynamics and entropy, he follows a humble, almost Buddhist path to nature. John Elder has captured the poet’s ecological perspective in his fine critical study, Imagining the Earth. N. Scott Momaday, son of a Kiowa artist, wrote The Way to Rainy Mountain to tell us what the loss of the Buffalo meant to the tribal culture of his people. In the novel House Made of Dawn and the collection of poems and drawings In the Presence of the Sun he captures the native vision of America. Joy Harjo, a poet of the Muscogee Nation, has a band and plays the sax. Her poetry blends story, prayer, and song in praise of the land and its spirit in books like How We Became Human and A Map to the Next World. Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan priest and revolutionary, in his Cosmic Canticle uses native creation mythology and contemporary science (from the Big Bang to quantum theory) to help us experience the ecstatic joy of creation and the love that binds it all together. Goals of the Course: 1) to focus on the first major American poet and his influence on American culture, north and south, native and European 2) to watch that influence interact with the developments of twentieth- century art, science, and poetry 3) to learn how to do a graduate-level paper and/or create a topical anthology 4) to discover some new literary friends (in the course and in our class). The Simultaneous and Alternative Paths of the Course: A. The Poetry Track: As Archie Ammons would have it, a poem is a walk, a going out and a return. This course goes out for several weeks from the major poems and prose writings of Whitman to the critical and biographical appraisals of his work. Each student will identify a scientific theme, a cosmic force or issue in Whitman to form the focus of the anthology project for the rest of the poets in the course and others discovered through cooperative research. Each student in this track will gather a set of later poems to create an anthology of works that parallel the major poems and prose of Whitman and play out new variations on the topic of the original paper. This creative enterprise will take the form of a small book which illustrates and includes the paper (now revised). An indispensable element of this major, term-long project will be the research teamwork of the course. We will keep track of everyone’s topic and interest, passing suggestions and findings by email, through note cards distributed in class, or in class discussion. You will be given credit not only for what your research produces for your project, but how it helps others. B. The Science Track: As the following syllabus of readings indicates, the structure of the course has two parts, before and after midterm, that set forth in an initial class an overview of the discoveries of science that prompted Whitman and Cardenal masterworks in the last two centuries. Needless to say the discoveries evolve to a grand vision of the universe and our contemplation of it that you can find on television, the internet, and the library of research journals and books. Each student will research an important field or concept of that theory and its ramifications in the poetic imagination, primarily of the two major poets we are reading, but also of other poems that might be found and included in an appendix. Students pursuing this track will be writing a term paper of eco- or cosmo-critical analysis informed by the range of poetry we explore in the course. On this path, the cooperative element will consist in helping other students find scientific resources, esp. diagrams and illustrations, for an understanding of the complexities of the science in their anthology projects. Week Date Reading Assignments and Classroom Activities 1) Jan. 13 Introduction to the course: The Balance between Poetry and Science The Native American Songs of Creation Course goals, schedule, requirements, and projects 2) Jan. 20 The Foundation for Whitman’s Song of Creation: short Epicurus: Letter to Herodotus (philosophy = essay) paper Lucretius: De Rerum Natura (philosophy = poetry) on your Nineteenth-century Science (esp. Chambers) topic Whitman’s Environmental Imagination (web site) 3) Jan. 27 Walt Whitman: “Song of Myself” “There Was a Child Went Forth” “This Compost” 4) Feb. 3 “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “The paper Noiseless Patient Spider,” “Crossing Brooklyn Song of Ferry,” “Sleepers,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” Myself and “The Mystic Trumpeter” 5) Feb. 10 Democratic Vistas and selections Specimen Days First Poetry Slam: William Carlos Williams and others of your choice 6) Feb. 17 Pablo Neruda: The Heights of Macchu Picchu using the bilingual edition. Get an overview of Canto General to establish the structure of his cosmic opus and the place of Macchu Picchu in it. 7) Feb. 24 N. Scott Momaday: In the Presence of the Sun and get an overview of House Made of Dawn, the novel, and esp. the native song it is based on. 8) Mar. 3 Spring break 9) Mar. 10 Twentieth-century Science - bibliography below 10) Mar. 17 Ernesto Cardenal: Cosmic Canticle 11) Mar. 24 Mas Cardenal: science, religion, and politics in the cosmos of meso-America 12) Mar. 31 Second poetry Slam using Joy Harjo and/or Gary Snyder plus others of your choice 13) Apr. 7 A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems, Expanded Ed. entropy and order 14) Apr. 14 Final workshop for term papers and anthologies 15) Apr. 21 Final projects due: show and tell in class 16) Apr. 28 Celebration Textbooks: The bookstore has ordered all of my preferences for the texts in this course. For most of the authors, you are free to use any edition. However, for Whitman, Neruda, and Cardenal, please buy or borrow the following four specific editions: Whitman Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Norton Critical Edition. Cardenal Cosmic Canticle. Tr. John Lyons. Curbstone Press. Neruda The Heights of Macchu Picchu. Bilingual Edition. Tr. Nathanial Tarn. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. Grade Formula: Papers: 30% Project (term paper or anthology): 40 % Class Participation (incl. attendance and Blackboard work): 30% Less than 90% attendance is grounds for failure; so as soon as you have to miss more than one class, you need to negotiate with me about how you can best make up for your absence. This will normally take the form of some kind of submission on Blackboard. Some of America’s Finest Earth Poets: In addition to the poets already in the syllabus of readings, here are your best bets for finding fresh perspectives on your themes for the poetry of earth (selected from Diyanni’s Modern American Poets: Their Voices and Visions): Elizabeth Bishop Louise Bogan Hart Crane e. e. cummings Alison Hawthorne Denning Emily Dickinson Rita Dove Elizabeth Fisher Robert Frost Allen Ginsberg Joy Harjo Robinson Jeffers Galway Kinnell Laurence Ferlinghetti Audrey Lorde W. S. Merwin Marianne Moore Mary Oliver Octavio Paz Adrienne Rich Theodore Roethke Pattiann Rogers Gary Snyder Wallace Stevens Susan Stewart May Swenson “The poetry of earth is ceasing never...” JOHN KEATS from “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” Science Bibliography: The list of nineteenth-century scientists with an influence on Whitman is on my web site, Concept page: Lyell, Liebig, LaVoisier, etc. They are summarized by Robert Chambers in his monumental compendium of earth and cosmic science: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. See also: A. S. Weber: 19th Century Science, An Anthology or Richard Holmes: The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science.

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