This is your Canon Challenge video for week 1 of ModPo. I'm recording this in the middle of a storm and maybe there's something about canon challenges and storms that make an appropriate match. Each week in the middle of the syllabus, we present a very brief commentary expressing our doubts, our concerns, our second thoughts, our basic questions about the poets and poetry encountered during that week. Partly to remind us, we ourselves, but also all ModPo participants that the canon, which is to say the selection of poets and poems that we make to fit or exemplify any category or phase or movement or period in modern and contemporary US poetry, needs to be pondered for its slants, its biases, it's oversights, it's unintended implications. In ModPo, we spend a lot of time talking about metapoetry, poetry about poems, poetry that indicates that it itself is a poem. Poems that make reference to their own status as meaning making. But we also want to think meta canonically, which is to say we want to ask how did we get to the point where these are the poems that are in the syllabus as opposed to others. We retain poems that we have doubts about often, almost always, but we want to be sure to include somehow in our conversations, the conversations that we have with and against those poems. You think about the canon as constantly dynamically, iteratively developing with all of the doubts that one has about anything that is developing in an ongoing way. ModPo plus the parallel syllabus that you can look at, it's huge, it gives us a chance to complicate and extend the main syllabus and implicit and sometimes explicit in the ModPo plus syllabus are poets and poems who challenge the main assumptions and definitions. You'll find in ModPo plus lots of video recordings of us talking about our doubts and questions. But in the main syllabus, which is really like a canon, an anthology, it's a small selection, agonizingly small. We have put in to the midweek syllabus each week a canon challenge video like this one and we hope that you get the impression that we don't think our syllabus fell from the sky. That we don't believe that the canon occurs naturally or inevitably, but represents a series of choices. What do those choices mean? As for week 1, since this is the canon challenge for week 1, Dickinson and Whitman Walt, if our goal was to find two poets who radically diverged from the sentimental Victorian verse being written overwhelmingly and published and celebrated through much of the 19th century in the United States. Well, with Dickinson and Whitman, both of whom were ignored, ridiculed, shunned, excluded from anthologies, especially Dickinson, for a long time in their time, we've certainly chosen well, we're not doubting that. But as for Dickinson, she's radical in her refusals sometimes often. She believes in the sheer power of the imagination which is something that leans forward toward modernism, something that we certainly join others in celebrating about modernism and it leads very well that belief in the sheer power of imagination to the poetry that comes along in the 20th century. Dickinson's poems show admirable, we think, impatience with verbosity, with wordiness, with gloopiness, with sentimentality that comes along just with wordiness, and the condescension that is associated with a 19th century poet who is wordy and therefore is proving his or her, but mostly his, worth as a poet. People who admire modernism that comes partly out of Dickinson, admire the way her poems cut through the rhetorical craft. But that intense severity comes along with themes of themes as well as a poetic practice of frank elitism. A tone of exclusion, a tone. It is possible to read a poem like I Dwell in Possibility as defining fairness, F-A-I-R-N-E-S-S, in such a way as to exclude those who are not fair even in the very large three or four ways in which Dickinson means that word. So you could say that Dickinson is not a poet who uses democratic forms. Later in the course when we get to the poetry of lists and catalogs, disconnected lists such as in week 7. The form of poems that are inclusive we find have lists and catalogs, poems that reserve their structural energies for democracies otherness, let's just say, you'll see what I mean about what I'm saying here, those later poems are not very Dickinsonian, let's just say that. Or you could skip forward right now to Amiri Baraka's poem, Incident, in week 6. Dickinson would have aligned herself with a confusion of pronouns, in that poem there are two third person pronouns he, equivalence is referring to different people presumably. She would align yourself with that. But overall, such an incident as told by the poet, by Baraka, could not have occurred in the hyper selective house of possibility. Now, as for Whitman, well, we can be briefer about our concerns or I can about my concerns about Whitman, because they're already included in our discussions. Our concerns about the extractive, appropriative exuberance of Walt Whitman. What I assume you shall assume. It's a gorgeous radical equation until you think about it a little bit. What room is there really, for the other, a truly distinct and different other in the work of a poet making all of those assumptions about who the other is. Divya Victor ends week 1 with her vision of these concerns. Her hyper-Whitmanian, she's not writing in an anti-Whitmanian style, she's using what we might call hyper-Whitmanian style. That prose poem, the hyper-Whitmanian prose poem, shows us the strange and dystopian furthest reach of the Whitmanian mode. I've done it in this storm, it's getting worse and worse. There's your canon challenge for week 1, yes. We have second thoughts about our arrangements for this very week, the opening week, and we certainly nonetheless do love talking about those concerns.