I suppose one can see in these three poets the broadest movement
from the 19th century through the 20th to the 21st.
And that's instructive in itself, for sure.
Emily Dickinson the proto-modernist.
Wallace Stevens the modernist, or as one might say the high modernist.
And Harryette Mullen, a post modern poet who shares poetic methods with
allitory poets, Oulipian poets, language poets, conceptual poets,
avant-garde movements that have come from various forms of post modernism.
So again, one might be able to view the three poems and the three discussions
as a quick tour of the proto modern, the modern, and the post modern.
But that was not our main concern when choosing these three poems.
Our concern was to teach ourselves, and we hope you, something about the meta poem.
The meta poem is poem, of course, about poetry.
A poem that is somehow aware of itself as a thing made of letters and words.
What we wanted to do here was to choose three poems different in so
many other ways that are each somehow about reading or about writing.
Poems about the reading of poems.
Poems about poets reading.
Poems about themselves.
Poems that use reading as an allegory for loving.
Poems that cannot be understood topically or thematically unless first,
one understands how they are about themselves, about the words they deploy,
about the love or loving of words as they are being written about.
As Harryette Mullen puts it, the secret acrostic of a lover's name,
a name you will discover as you read the very poem encoding that secret
in its alphabetical existence.
What Wallace Stevens in Large Red Man Reading calls the literal characters.
So we urge you to watch the three videos in the order in which we made them.
First on Dickinson's poem, We Learned the Whole of Love.
Then on Stevens's poem, Large Red Man Reading.
Then on two pieces of Harryette Mullen's book Sleeping With The Dictionary.
So read the poems first of course, and
during the video discussions please note that our method of working through close
readings of the poems implies that we don't have the final word on them.
That you are seeing us,
witnessing us indeed in the act of finding what will suffice to understand them.
Since the poems are about reading, and we are reading collaboratively, the already
iterative process that's written into the poems by poets interested in reading and
writing extends to the process of our reading them too.
And this is, for me at least,
one of the great pleasures of working with poems that are supposedly difficult.
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