[email protected] Orcid.Org/0000-0002-7504-3879

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Grzegorz.Kosc@Uw.Edu.Pl Orcid.Org/0000-0002-7504-3879 Nov. 18, 2020 GRZEGORZ KOSC American Studies Center, University of Warsaw al. Niepodleglosci 22, 02–653 Warsaw e-mail: [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-7504-3879 EDUCATION Habilitation (post-doctoral degree) in humanities, literary studies, University of Lodz, 26 Jun 2015 Robert Frost’s Political Body (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014) PhD in American Literature, University oF Lodz, English Institute, 23 Feb 2001 Dissertation: “The Uncomfortable Epigone of the Grands Maîtres: Robert Lowell Between Modernism and Post-Modernism.” Advisor: Professor Agnieszka Salska. PhD program 1 Oct 1996–20 Oct 2000. MA in American Studies, University oF Warsaw, American Studies Center, 6 Oct 1999 Thesis: “Two Sides of the Moon: Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford in Search for a Program of America’s Cultural Renewal.” Supervisor: Professor Piotr Skurowski MA in American Literature, University oF Lodz, English Institute, 26 Aug 1996 Thesis: “The Developments of Narrative Realism in the Fiction of Henry James and Peter Taylor.” Supervisor: Professor Agnieszka Salska BA in Foreign language teaching, 1993 Teacher’s Training College in Plock OTHER School of Criticism and Theory (SCT), Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; a seminar on globalization by Perry Anderson, 25th session, Jun–Aug 2001 Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota, Department of English, Mar–Jun 1996 Chichester College oF Technology, England, Teacher Training Program, Mar–Apr 1992 EXPERIENCE American Studies Center, University oF Warsaw wesbsite: https://www.asc.uw.edu.pl email: [email protected] Current status: Associate Professor, since 1 Oct 2006 COURSES TAUGHT § Culture Wars in American Monumental Art, 2015 § American Monuments, Fall 2014 Grzegorz Kość / curriculum vitae / Nov. 18, 2020 § Race in American Visual Culture 2014 § Photography in American Literature 2012–2013 § Politics in American Literature, fall 2012 § American Political Body, fall 2012 § Postwar American Drama, fall 2011 § Academic Writing, BA program, first-year students, 2010–11, fall 2012 § American Short Story, 2009 § American Literature before 1945, 2009 § American Poetry after 1945, 2007–2009 § American Nationalism and Collective Memory, 2007–2008 § Photographs about America, 2007–2008, 2010 § MA Seminar, American Writer in the Public Sphere, 2006–2008 § Course “Photography in American literature” awarded from an innovative teaching fund of the University of Warsaw, fall 2012 § Agnieszka Kotwasinska’s MA thesis, written under my supervision, received, from the Polish Association for American Studies (PAAS), the Annual Award for the Best American Studies Master’s Thesis Written at a Polish University ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERIENCE SERVICE TO UNIVERSITY § Rector’s Committee for the Evaluation of Fellowship Applications, Sep 2020 § UW Electoral College member, 3 Feb 2020 § Nominated member of the UW Literary Studies Discipline Council, Sep 2019 § UW Electoral College member, 12 Feb 2019 § Reviewing Committee at the English Institute of the University of Warsaw, Mar 16, 2018 SERVICE TO DEPARTMENT § Director, American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, Dec. 2016– § Deputy Director for Research of the Institute of the Americas and Europe (IAIE), University of Warsaw, June 2016–Dec 2016 § Head of the IAIE Election Committee, 2016 § Head of the ASC Admissions Committee, Sep 2012, 2013–2017 § Member on the ASC Admissions Committee, Jul 2012, Jul 2010, Jun 2008 § Coordinating American Studies Colloquium Lecture Series at the American Studies Center, 2016-2017 § Coordinating the American literature survey course in the BA program, 2012–2016, 2018– 2019 § Organizing an American studies session for the Warsaw Science Festival, Sep 24–25, 2007 Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw § PhD Supervisor, Alicja Relidzynska, 2020– SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities § PhD Supervisor, May 2018 American Literature and Culture Department, English Institute, University oF Lodz (tel.: +48 665 52 20; [email protected]) associate professor, since 14 Oct 2000–30 Sep 2016 COURSES TAUGHT § Introduction to Literary Studies, 2014 § American Literature survey course, lecture, 2014 § Photography in Literature, MA seminar, fall 2012 2 Grzegorz Kość / curriculum vitae / Nov. 18, 2020 § Proseminar “Literature Before 1945,” fall 2012 § American culture seminars (third- and fourth-year students), 2001–2010 § Literary Theory, a lecture, 2001–2010 § Introduction to American culture (first-year students), 1996–2010 § American Literature, a survey course (third-year students), 2000–2002, 2009–2010 § Composition, translation, and conversation classes (fourth- and third-year students), 2000– 2003 ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERIENCE SERVICE TO DEPARTMENT § Chair of the American Studies Section, 2012–2016 § Member of the English Institute Council, 2012–2016 § Coordinator of the BA program of the English-Institute and Journalism Department fall 2012 § Organizing the visit of David Gewanter, a coeditor of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (2005) 2006 § Organizing a series of conferences on American regions in cooperation with the US Embassy, 2002–2004: “Contemporary American South,” Sep 16–19, 2002; “The Many American Wests,” Sep 21–25, 2003; “New England and the Urban Northeast,” Sep 19–22, 2004 § Secretary of the Admissions Committee, Jun–Jul 2005 § Member of the Admissions Committee, 2002 Spanish Philology Department, University of Lodz • English language advanced course, 2012–2013 • Introduction to American Culture, a lecture 2009–2012 • Translation courses for first- and second years students, spring 2012 English Philology Department, Wszechnica Swietokrzyska, Kielce • American literature survey course, 2004–2010 • History of American literature, a lecture, 2004–2010 English Philology Department, College oF Humanities and Economics WSHE, Lodz • BA seminar in Contemporary Am. Literature for third-year students, 2002–2006 • MA seminar, 2003–2006 English as a Foreign Language, WSHE, Lodz • Teaching English to first- and second-year students, 1997–98 PUBLICATIONS MONOGRAPHS Robert Frost’s Political Body. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. 346 pages Second Degree Award from the Rector of the University of Lodz Reviewed: Paulina Ambrozy, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 50, no. 1 (2015): 95–99; Andrew Hodgson, Journal of American Studies 50, no. 2 (May 2016) E23; Timothy O’Brien, Robert Frost Review 25 (2015): 125–30; Agnieszka Salska, Polish Journal of American Studies 9 (2015): 168– 74; Donald G. Sheehy, Review of English Studies 67 no. 281 (2016): 822–24. Citation Index: Robert Lowell: Uncomfortable Epigone of the Grands Maîtres. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005. 338 pages First Degree Award from the Rector of the University of Lodz 3 Grzegorz Kość / curriculum vitae / Nov. 18, 2020 Reviewed: Joanna Durczak, Polish Journal of American Studies 2 (2008): 157–61; Frank Kearful, “Poetry: The 1940s to the Present,” American Literary Scholarship—2006, 391– 419 EDITED VOLUMES Robert Lowell’s Memoirs, coedited with Steven G. Axelrod. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (forthcoming, 2022) Robert Lowell in Context, coedited with Thomas Austenfeld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (forthcoming, 2022) The Transatlantic Sixties: Europe and the United States in the Counterculture Decade, edited by Grzegorz Kosc, Clara Juncker, Sharon Monteith, and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013. 316 pages Reviews: Andrew Kloiber, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 22.3 (Jul 2014), p. 359-60; Frank Kaltofen, Portal für Politikwissenschaft, 13.03.2014; Dietmar Hüser, Francia-Recensio, 2015-1, 19./20. Jahrhundert - Histoire contemporaine, ISSN: 2425- 3510 Tools of Their Tools: Communication Technologies and American Cultural Practice, edited by Grzegorz Kosc and Krzysztof Majer. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009. 315 pages ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS ReFereed journal articles “Robert Giroux and the Editing of Lowell’s ‘The Balanced Aquarium.’” Co-written with Steven Gould Axelrod. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 37, no. 1 (forthcoming, Winter 2022) “Robert Frost’s Traitors and His Poetics of Disloyalty.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 17, no. 1 (2019): 23–47. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pan.2019.0001 “Robert Lowell’s Onionskin Aesthetic.” Papers on Language and Literature 54, no. 2 (2018): 1–17 “Frost Less ‘Executive’ than Stevens.” Wallace Stevens Journal 41, no. 1 (2017): 70–73. doi:10.1353/wsj.2017.0007 “The Undoing of the Maya and Robert Frost’s Chafed Boulders.” Robert Frost Review 20 (2010): 47– 97. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43897267 “Wielki lancuch bytu w miasteczku Bogalusa w Luizjanie. Stosunki rasowe w Magic City (1992) Yusefa Komunyakaa’i.” [The Great Chain of Being in Bogalusa, Louisiana: Racial Relations in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Magic City (1992)] Podteksty 1 (peer-reviewed online journal) (2007) <www.podteksty.pl> “Robert Lowell’s Symbolic Action in Support of Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Presidential Campaign.” Communism, Capitalism and the Politics of Culture. ZENAF Conference Proceedings Volume 4/2004. Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main. 68–89. “Sleeping Beauties: Female Protagonists in the Selected Works of Turn-of-the-Century American Women Writers." Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Literaria Anglica 3, Studies in English and American Literature (7) (1999): 65–72. http://hdl.handle.net/11089/14384 “Realizm umarl, niech zyje realizm.” [Realism is dead. Long live realism.] Tygiel Kultury 17 (1997): 35–38. 4 Grzegorz Kość / curriculum vitae
Recommended publications
  • April 2005 Updrafts
    Chaparral from the California Federation of Chaparral Poets, Inc. serving Californiaupdr poets for over 60 yearsaftsVolume 66, No. 3 • April, 2005 President Ted Kooser is Pulitzer Prize Winner James Shuman, PSJ 2005 has been a busy year for Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. On April 7, the Pulitzer commit- First Vice President tee announced that his Delights & Shadows had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And, Jeremy Shuman, PSJ later in the week, he accepted appointment to serve a second term as Poet Laureate. Second Vice President While many previous Poets Laureate have also Katharine Wilson, RF Winners of the Pulitzer Prize receive a $10,000 award. Third Vice President been winners of the Pulitzer, not since 1947 has the Pegasus Buchanan, Tw prize been won by the sitting laureate. In that year, A professor of English at the University of Ne- braska-Lincoln, Kooser’s award-winning book, De- Fourth Vice President Robert Lowell won— and at the time the position Eric Donald, Or was known as the Consultant in Poetry to the Li- lights & Shadows, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2004. Treasurer brary of Congress. It was not until 1986 that the po- Ursula Gibson, Tw sition became known as the Poet Laureate Consult- “I’m thrilled by this,” Kooser said shortly after Recording Secretary ant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. the announcement. “ It’s something every poet dreams Lee Collins, Tw The 89th annual prizes in Journalism, Letters, of. There are so many gifted poets in this country, Corresponding Secretary Drama and Music were announced by Columbia Uni- and so many marvelous collections published each Dorothy Marshall, Tw versity.
    [Show full text]
  • ENG 351 Lecture 33 1 Let's Finish Discussing Gwendolyn Brooks. I
    ENG 351 Lecture 33 1 Let’s finish discussing Gwendolyn Brooks. I would like your indulgence to make up for last time. I really was blind. It was — and one of you saved my life, with my visual migraine which sent me into something of a panic. Something else I’ve learned is you should never — you should never read a poem in public that you haven’t read for many years. It can sneak up on you and kick you, and that’s what this poem did. I haven’t looked at The Chicago Defender poem for a long, long, long time. And here I am, half blinded, and then I got emotional at the end of it. So I apologize for that and see if I can get through this with a decent reading. That happened to me one time before with a poem called “April Inventory” by W. D. Snodgrass. And sometimes, you know, poetry has a — has a way of getting to you, whether you want it to or not. But let me — it’s a good poem. It’s only a few minutes long. If you can bear with it, I wanted to get that on in the lesson. This was the poem that I asked Gwendolyn Brooks why she didn’t read it while she was here and she said she no longer liked the ending of it. So I particularly want you to pay attention to the ending of it. She asked me why I liked it and I said because I’m from Little Rock, and then she inquired, “How old were you in 1957?” And when I told her I was eleven, it was okay.
    [Show full text]
  • Program Notes by Michael Moore Rewind//PLAY//Fastforward Performed October 17, 2009
    Program Notes by Michael Moore rewind//PLAY//fastforward Performed October 17, 2009 This evening’s concert begins a season-long celebration of American choral music. The concert opens and closes with music of Charles Ives, that most original and enigmatic of American composers, and also includes Frostiana, Randall Thompson’s superb setting of seven Robert Frost poems. We rewind for a reprise concert performance of David Lang’s deeply moving battle hymns, premiered last season, and fast forward to a preview of Roberto Sierra’s Missa Latina, which Mendelssohn Club will present in its Philadelphia premiere in April. Charles Ives The uniquely eclectic musical style of Charles Ives (1874-1954) was greatly influenced by his father. George Ives was a cornet player and military bandleader in the Civil War, and had returned to his native Danbury, Connecticut where he continued as a bandleader, conductor of theater orchestras and choir director. He had a keen interest in acoustical effects, once marching two bands across the town green from opposite directions, playing different tunes in different keys to gauge the effect, building a device for playing music in quarter tones, and teaching his son to sing in one key while accompanying him in another. He encouraged Charles to experiment with different musical effects, but also instilled in him a love of traditional hymns and tunes, all of which influenced his later music. By the time he entered Yale at 20, Ives was a virtuoso organist and an accomplished pianist and composer. He had already written such significant works as his Variations on America and Psalm 67.
    [Show full text]
  • Re-Visions of Christian Faith in Robert Penn Warren's
    Robert Penn Warren Studies Volume 7 Robert Penn Warren Studies Article 7 2007 “The eepD est and Widest Metaphor for Life” Re- visions of Christian Faith in Robert Penn Warren’s Later Poetry Nicole Camastra Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Camastra, Nicole (2007) "“The eD epest and Widest Metaphor for Life” Re-visions of Christian Faith in Robert Penn Warren’s Later Poetry," Robert Penn Warren Studies: Vol. 7 , Article 7. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies/vol7/iss1/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Robert Penn Warren Studies by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NICOLE CAMASTRA 19 “The Deepest and Widest Metaphor for Life”: Re -Visions of Christian Faith in Robert Penn Warren’s Later Poetry NICOLE CAMASTRA In Robert Penn Warren’s obituary in The New York Times, Cleanth Brooks reminisced of his old friend that he was “a valiant warrior for the truth and one of our very finest poets.”1 Part of what characterized Warren’s search for verity was his quality of being a yearner, which he described to Brooks by saying, “Now I know that you are a communicant and a believer. A person like me, who is not but who finds in Christianity the deepest and widest metaphor for life, might be described as a yearner.”2 It would be foolish to assert that Warren was a committed Christian and unequivocal believer and thereby deny the considerable evidence that he was not, but a kind of tempered faith does exist in some of Warren’s poems from Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978.
    [Show full text]
  • The Library of America Interviews Lloyd Schwartz About Elizabeth Bishop
    The Library of America Interviews Lloyd Schwartz about Elizabeth Bishop In connection with the publication in October 2007 of Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters , edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, Rich Kelley conducted this exclusive interview for The Library of America e-Newsletter. Sign up for the free monthly e-Newsletter at www.loa.org . Critics now consider Elizabeth Bishop one of the great poets of the 20th century, but they have a bit of problem placing her. Marianne Moore was an early mentor and Robert Lowell raved about her first book of poems and became a close friend, yet her poems are not confessional. Some people say she reminds them of Wallace Stevens, others of Robert Frost. How would you characterize Elizabeth Bishop’s achievement and why is she so difficult to place? Maybe what makes her hard to place is exactly what makes her different from anyone else. The more we learn about her the more we realize that her biography has a lot more to do with both the kind of poet she was and with the subject of her poems than first meets the eye. Here was someone who grew up essentially an orphan. Her father died when she was only a few months old. Her mother had a series of nervous breakdowns , was not able to take care of her , and was institutionalized when Bishop was four. Elizabeth never saw her again even though her mother lived for 18 more years. She was brought up by her grandparents and her aunts and farmed out to private schools.
    [Show full text]
  • A Tribute to Robert Penn Warren J
    The Kentucky Review Volume 2 | Number 3 Article 3 1981 A Tribute to Robert Penn Warren J. A. Bryant Jr. University of Kentucky Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Bryant, J. A. Jr. (1981) "A Tribute to Robert Penn Warren," The Kentucky Review: Vol. 2 : No. 3 , Article 3. Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kentucky-review/vol2/iss3/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Kentucky Libraries at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Kentucky Review by an authorized editor of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Tribute to Robert Penn Warren J. A. BRYANT, JR. We are all here tonight for the same purpose, to honor a man who by his achievements and his stature as a human being, can come closer than anyone else I know to making Kentucky, which is after all a hodge-podge geographically, politically, and c111.lturally, if there ever was one, speak with one voice, say yes to something in unison. It's a cause for both sadness and rejoicing that there are some occasions when more than miles separate the Purchase and the mountains, the Tennessee Ridge and the Ohio River. But Red Warren, as his friends have been calling him now for most of his seventy-five years, miraculously unites Bluegrass and Pennyrile, just as he has miraculously encompassed Tennessee, Louisiana, the Midwest, New England, to say nothing of Europe and especially Italy, and made them, transformed, inhabit a body of fiction and verse in which we detect what Donald Davison, an old friend and Tennessean, was wont to call "the Kentucky voice of Warren." It's a distinctive voice that we Kentuckians respond to, acknowledge, and tonight claim as our own.
    [Show full text]
  • William Carlos Williams' Indian Son(G)
    The News from That Strange, Far Away Land: William Carlos Williams’ Indian Son(g) Graziano Krätli YALE UNIVERSITY 1. In his later years, William Carlos Williams entertained a long epistolary relationship with the Indian poet Srinivas Rayaprol (1925-98), one of a handful who contributed to the modernization of Indian poetry in English in the first few decades after the independence from British rule. The two met only once or twice, but their correspondence, started in the fall of 1949, when Rayaprol was a graduate student at Stanford University, continued long after his return to India, ending only a few years before Williams’ passing. Although Williams had many correspondents in his life, most of them more important and better known literary figures than Rayaprol, the young Indian from the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh was one of the very few non-Americans and the only one from a postcolonial country with a long and glorious literary tradition of its own. More important, perhaps, their correspondence occurred in a decade – the 1950s – in which a younger generation of Indian poets writing in English was assimilating the lessons of Anglo-American Modernism while increasingly turning their attention away from Britain to America. Rayaprol, doubly advantaged by virtue of “being there” (i.e., in the Bay Area at the beginning of the San Francisco Renaissance) and by his mentoring relationship with Williams, was one of the very first to imbibe the new poetic idiom from its sources, and also one of the most persistent in trying to keep those sources alive and meaningful, to him if not to his fellow poets in India.
    [Show full text]
  • Modern Poetry Seminar “Shifting Poetics: from High Modernism to Eco-Poetics to Black Lives Matter”
    San José State University Department of English and Comparative Literature ENGLISH 211: Modern Poetry Seminar “Shifting Poetics: From High Modernism to Eco-Poetics to Black Lives Matter” Spring 2021 Instructor: Prof. Alan Soldofsky Office Location: FO 106 Telephone: 408-924-4432 Email: [email protected] Virtual Office Hours: M, W 3:00 – 4:30 PM, and Th p.m. by appointment Class Days/Time: Synchronous Zoom Meetings M 7:00 – 8:30 PM; Asynchronous on Canvas (24/7) Classroom: Zoom Credit Units: 4 Credits Course Description This seminar is designed to engage students in an immersive study of salient themes and innovations in selected poets from the 20th and 21st centuries. The curriculum will include practice in close reading/explication of selected poems. The course will be taught in a partially synchronous distance learning mode, using SJSU’s Canvas and Zoom platforms, with weekly Monday Zoom class meetings, 7:00 – 8:15 p.m. The course may be taken two times for credit (toward an MA or MFA degree). Thematic Focus Shifting Cultural Politics and Poetics from High Modernism to Eco-Poetics to Black Lives Matter (1909 – 2021) The emphasis during the semester will be on the evolving poetics and associated cultural politics as viewed through various aesthetic movements in poetry from the high modernist period to the present. During the semester the curriculum will include reading one or more poems (online) by the following poets: W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Robinson Jeffers, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, H.
    [Show full text]
  • William Carlos Williams
    LOOKING TO WRITE GRADES 7-12 The Poetry of William Carlos Williams INTRODUCTION William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey, the son of an English father and Puerto Rican mother. In addition to being an important poet and writer, he was a medical doctor for more than 40 years, serving the community of Rutherford. His daily encounters with patients often informed his writing, creating poems that captured everyday life in the United States. Williams was a leading figure in the Imagist movement, which focused on American subject matter, and emphasized simplicity, expression, and precision through the use of visual images. LOOKING CLOSER Good writers, like good artists, recognize the power of detail in their work. A single flower, closely observed and drawn, has the force of the real behind it. Charles Demuth, whose painting of a flower we see here, painted in just this fashion. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Demuth studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. While a student there, he lived in the same boarding house as William Carlos Williams. The two became friends for life. With each pulse of words in Williams’ poem, we see a kinship to the vitality in the spare expression of Demuth’s flower. View the artwork in detail on the Museum’s collection page here! Charles Demuth, Poppies, 1926. Watercolor on cardboard. SBMA, Gift of Wright S. Ludington, 1945.6.4.. This lesson was prepared by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Education Department, 2021. READ: POETRY BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS The poetry of William Carlos Williams is the verbal equivalent of that simple, yet telling sketch.
    [Show full text]
  • The Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetic Speaker in the Works of Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, and George Oppen
    “THE OCCASION OF THESE RUSES”: THE MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETIC SPEAKER IN THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOWELL, FRANK O’HARA, AND GEORGE OPPEN A dissertation submitted by Matthew C. Nelson In partial fulfillment for the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In English TUFTS UNIVERSITY May 2016 ADVISER: VIRGINIA JACKSON Abstract This dissertation argues for a new history of mid-twentieth-century American poetry shaped by the emergence of the figure of the poetic speaker as a default mode of reading. Now a central fiction of lyric reading, the figure of the poetic speaker developed gradually and unevenly over the course of the twentieth century. While the field of historical poetics draws attention to alternative, non-lyric modes of address, this dissertation examines how three poets writing in this period adapted the normative fiction of the poetic speaker in order to explore new modes of address. By choosing three mid-century poets who are rarely studied beside one another, this dissertation resists the aesthetic factionalism that structures most historical models of this period. My first chapter, “Robert Lowell’s Crisis of Reading: The Confessional Subject as the Culmination of the Romantic Tradition of Poetry,” examines the origins of M.L. Rosenthal’s phrase “confessional poetry” and analyzes how that the autobiographical effect of Robert Lowell’s poetry emerges from a strange, collage-like construction of multiple texts and non- autobiographical subjects. My second chapter reads Frank O’Hara’s poetry as a form of intentionally averted communication that treats the act of writing as a surrogate for the poet’s true object of desire.
    [Show full text]
  • 20190607 Theslowdown 20190
    20190607_theslowdown_20190607_128 Wed, 9/30 7:24PM 5:00 SUMMARY KEYWORDS poem, wind, speaker, poet, poetry, dh, buried, rapturous, door, gathering storm, lawrence, thawing, draw, writer, infallible, crucifix, nester, learn, invocation, surrounds 00:05 I'm Tracy k Smith, and this is the slow down. 00:22 I think there are a number of misconceptions about poetry in the popular imagination. One is that the poet has buried an encoded message deep within the poem that the reader must wrestle out. Another is that when a reader encounters different perspectives within a single poem, like sorrow and joy, one perspective has to be right and the other wrong. But sometimes a person can be both happy and sad. At the same time, one feeling doesn't always win out over the other, which is why poems quite often arise out of the desire to acknowledge and explore the messy, complex, contradictory nature of life. And while it is sometimes an abundance of feelings and opinions, that draw young poets to the art form, I suspect that more poems arise out of the writers desire to learn, listen and discover, than out of the intention to make grand or infallible pronouncements realizing this when I was a younger writer, set me free, allowing me to engage with all manner of material about which I knew little and sought to learn more dh Lawrence's poem, song of a man who has come through is an example of a poem written out of the wish not to pronounce, but to receive wisdom. The poem opens, Not I, Not I, but the wind that blows through me.
    [Show full text]
  • San José State University Department of English and Comparative Literature ENGLISH 131: Writing Poetry, Sec. 1 Fall 2014
    San José State University Department of English and Comparative Literature ENGLISH 131: Writing Poetry, sec. 1 Fall 2014 Instructor: Prof. Alan Soldofsky Office Location: FO 106 Telephone: 408-924-4432 Email: [email protected] Office Hours: M, T, W 1:30 – 3:00 PM, Th PM by appointment Class Days/Time: M W 12:00 – 1:15 PM Classroom: Clark Hall 111 (Incubator Classroom) Prerequisites: ENGL 71: Introduction to Creative Writing (or equivalent); or instructor’s consent. Course Description Workshop in verse forms and poetic craft. Study of traditional and contemporary models. (May be repeated for credit.) Methods and Procedures • Students in this course will write and revise original poems, which class members will critique during the weekly in-class workshops. • Class will be divided into four student writing-groups whose members will post drafts of poems to Canvas for other members to discuss (on the Student Groups setting in Canvas). • Student Writing-Groups (one group per week) will have their members’ poems discussed in the weekly in-class workshop. • The workshop’s principal text will be class members’ original poems posted on our workshop’s Canvas and Blogger sites. • Verse forms and poetic craft will be taught through assigned readings from the required textbooks and from links to poems and commentary on the Internet. comprised of published poems, an online prosody workbook with commentaries and craft exercises, and links to poems and commentaries (sometimes including audio and video files of poets reading. • The class will be divided into 4 student writing-groups (6 or 7 students per group) to discuss first/early drafts of poems.
    [Show full text]