The Making of Modern Poems: A Workshop Autumn 2020 / Tutor: Dr JT Welsch

Module Summary

Hello, and welcome to The Making of Modern Poems! This module is your chance to explore and experiment with different possibilities for manufacturing poems. Our weekly sessions will adopt the structure of what the American poet Charles Bernstein calls a ‘reading workshop’, in which discussions centre around your own creative responses to the assigned reading. No prior poetry writing experience is necessary, since the aim is equally to explore new critical perspectives through your own experiments. On this module, writing is a form of reading.

Beginning with radical new possibilities for the modernist lyric, we’ll consider innovative modes of poem-making over the past century, which share a broadly materialist approach to language as a medium – hence making poems as much as writing them. Each week, we’ll look at a selection of writing associated with a particular methodology, including concrete and visual poetry, field composition, constraint-based writing, autobiography, neo-formalisms, appropriation, and post- internet writing. As critics, the focus on practices and techniques, rather than ‘schools’ or ‘movements’, will help us understand the ways these have been combined and adapted across periods. But we’ll also produce our own poetry, in order to get a hands-on sense of how these ideas function in practice. In the latter part of the module, the department’s letterpress printing studio will provide another tool for our experiments with poetry’s materiality.

Weekly Structure

In practice, each week of this module will involve the following: 1. Read a selection of poetry that adopts a particular creative approach. 2. Write a short creative response to these models, testing out possibilities for how that approach might be applied or adapted. This could be a single poem or a short sequence – anything between 1 and 3 pages. 3. Upload these creative pieces by the deadline agreed. 4. Read each other’s work before our workshop discussion.

Module aims

On this module, you will: • explore a range of established approaches for producing innovative or experimental poetry; • relate these approaches to their historical, theoretical, and aesthetic contexts; • support your production of a body of original writing, which demonstrates a critical engagement with readings.

Module learning outcomes

Upon successfully completing this module, you will be able to: 1. Demonstrate an advanced understanding of and engagement with a range of established approaches for producing innovative or experimental poetry. 2. Demonstrate an advanced understanding of the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic contexts within which these approaches have developed. 3. Produce a portfolio of original writing which demonstrates a critical engagement with modern (twentieth- and twenty-first century) poetry-making.

Assessment

The summative assessment for this module is a 4500-word portfolio, developed out of the formative weekly responses. In keeping with the module’s critical-creative nature, students decide for themselves the balance of poetry and criticism in their final submission, and are welcome to divide it evenly or unevenly between the two. A 4500-word essay is perfectly acceptable, as is a hybrid submission moving between creative work and criticism, or a selection of shorter pieces. An equivalent word- count for visual poetry or other non-standard formatting can be agreed with the tutor in advance. All submissions should include a bibliography, though standard referencing may not always be appropriate.

Essential Books

Freely available online: • Hope Mirrlees, Paris (Hogarth Press, 1919). [available online] • Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914). [any edition, or available online] • Aram Saroyan, Aram Saroyan (Random House, 1968). [available online]

To acquire: • Adventures in Form: A Compendium of Poetic Forms, Rules & Constraints (Penned in the Margins, 2012). • Harriet Tarlo, Field (Shearsman Books, 2016). • Dorothea Lasky, Rome (Liveright, 2012). • NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Wesleyan, 2011). • Susan Howe, This That (New Directions, 2011).

Weekly Syllabus

The reading for each week serves the dual-purpose of inspiring creative responses and informing workshop discussion. It includes a number of complete poetry volumes (listed above), alongside individual poems to be provided as scans. These creative texts are the focus of the module, offering possibilities for your own work. Feel free to skip around, explore writers further, and focus on what interests you most. On the VLE page for each week, I have also indicated key critical texts as further reading, which will help explore the thinking behind different practices.

Week 2: The Modern(ist) Lyric

By the early twentieth century, the lyric's status as a primary poetic mode was being challenges from all sides. In our first seminar, we'll consider ways in which modernist poets tested the limits of lyricism and definitions of the lyric poem as a specific form. Drawing on previous work you'll likely have done with other canonical modernists, we'll read and discuss lyrical or anti-lyrical experiments by Hope Mirelees, Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hughes.

Primary reading: • Hope Mirelees, Paris (1919) • Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

Selections from: • Langston Hughes: ‘The Weary Blues’, ‘Dream Boogie’, ‘Dream Boogie: Variation’, ‘Easy Boogie’, ‘Boogie: 1 A.M.’, ‘Lady’s Boogie’, ‘Flatted Fifths’, and ‘April Rain Song’.

Week 3: Concrete & Visual

Concrete and visually-oriented poetry has a long history, going back to George Herbert's 'Easter Wings' (pictured below, and published 1633) and earlier. In the early twentieth century, poets like EE Cummings and Guilluame Apollinaire took inspiration from visual artists and advertising to explore new possibilities for what has more recently been dubbed ‘vis-po’. For this week, we’ll focus on mid-century writers who developed new minimalist and concrete approaches to typography and text on the page, building on this longer visual tradition.

Primary reading: • Aram Saroyan, Aram Saroyan (Random House, 1968) – also available in Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems (Primary Information / Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014).

Selections from: • An Anthology of Concrete Poetry [1967], ed. Emmett Williams (Primary Information, 2013). • The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century, eds. Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe (Hayward Gallery, 2015).

Week 4: Constraints & Procedures

Robert Frost famously said the idea of ‘free verse’ was like playing tennis with the net down. In week 4, we’ll look at a strand of modern poetry that embraces the possibilities to be found within self-imposed writing constraints. While many Anglophone poets take inspiration from the Oulipo school, a loose grouping of French writers who developed extreme rules for their writing in the 1960s and 70s, we’ll also see contemporary poets looking to video games or programming languages for a different kind of play within constraints.

Primary reading: • Adventures in Form: A Compendium of Poetic Forms, Rules & Constraints (Penned in the Margins, 2012).

Selections from: • The Penguin Book of Oulipo, ed. Philip Terry (Penguin, 2019). • Raymond Queneau, A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (1961) - online generator and excerpt in Penguin antho. • Christian Bok, Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001). • Nasser Hussain, SKI WRI TEI NGS (Coach House Books, 2018).

Week 5: Field Theory

The idea of treating the poem as a 'field' or space which in the poem operates comes from William Carlos Williams' 1948 essay, 'The Poem as a Field of Action'. The possibilities for 'composition by field' were further expanded by Williams' protege, Charles Olson, in the 1950 essay/manifesto, 'Projective Verse'. Field composition draws on various theory - everything from Freud and Einstein to notions of writing's organic relationship to the body or natural world - and in practice works to explode the traditional structures of how a poem might look, read, and move on the page.

Primary reading: • Harriet Tarlo, Field (Shearsman Books, 2016).

Selections from: • William Carlos Williams, 'Asphodel, That Greeny Flower' (1955). • Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field (1978). • Charles Olson, Maximus Poems (1983). • Denise Levertov, Selected Poems (2002).

Week 6: Reading Week

Week 7: Beyond Confession

Although poets had long incorporated autobiographical material into their work, ML Rosenthal's 1959 review of Robert Lowell's collection Life Studies helped to popularise the notion of 'Poetry as Confession' (the title of Rosenthal's review). Although Lowell and other poets like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman all rejected the label, they are often associated with the so-called 'confessionalist' school. Whatever we call it, their experiments with autobiographicality, poetic masks and personae have shaped English-language poetry since. In this week, we'll consider new possibilities for confessional or 'post-confessional' writing in the context of new discourses of identity and self.

Primary reading: • Dorothea Lasky, Rome (2012).

Selections from: • Robert Lowell, Life Studies (1959) • Sharon Olds, Stag’s Leap (2012) • Morgan Parker, There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé (2017). • Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2018). • Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead (2018).

Week 8: New (& Newer) Formalisms

In the second half of the twentieth century, responding in part to the spread of free verse and more experimental approaches, poets like Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, and Mona Van Duyn returned to more traditional verse forms, exploring possibles for more formal metre and rhyme schemes in a postmodern age. In week 8, we'll read a selection of work from 'new formalist' poets writing in the 70s and 80s, alongside more recent work bringing these impulses into the twenty-first century.

Selections from: • (Older) New Formalists: Howard Nemerov, Elizabeth Bishop, and Richard Wilbur. • (Newer) Formalists: Frederick Seidel, Joshua Mehigan, Michael Robbins, and Kay Ryan.

Week 9: Appropriation & Testimony

Primary reading: • NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (2011).

Selections from: • Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). • John Beer, The Waste Land and Other Poems (2010). • Vanessa Place, 'Afterword', I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (2012). • Kenneth Goldsmith, 'Introduction', Uncreative Writing (Columbia University Press, 2011).

Week 10: Digital/Material

In our final week, we'll consider the impact of digital contexts on poem-making. In the broadest sense, this means asking complex questions about the material status of digital texts, as poetry is increasingly produced, disseminated, and consumed online, asking how different platforms and different screens affect our reading experience. Looking at material collage work by Susan Howe alongside 'post-internet' poets like Sam Riviere and Hera Lindsay Bird, and so-called 'Insta-poets' like Rupi Kaur and Amanda Lovelace, will helps us explore the range of digital and material possibilities now open to poets.

Primary reading: • Susan Howe, This That (New Direction, 2011).

Selections from: • Sam Riviere, Kim Kardashian’s Marriage (Faber, 2015). • Hera Lindsay Bird, Hera Lindsay Bird (Penguin, 2017). • Mirtha Dermisache, Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018). • Intagram feeds: Amanda Lovelace, Tyler Knott Gregson, Rupi Kaur (plus Milk and Honey, 2015), and any others you find interesting.