ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly "difficult." We encounter and discuss the poems one at a time. It's much easier than it seems! Join us and try it! Yes, the next live, interactive 10-week session of ModPo will begin on September 8, 2018, and will conclude on November 19, 2018. Al Filreis will be in touch with you by email before the September 8 start of the course with all the information you'll need to participate. If you have questions, you can email the ModPo team at modpo@writing.upenn.edu. During the 10 weeks of the course, you will be guided through poems, video discussions of each poem, and community discussions of each poem. And (unique among open online courses) we offer weekly, interactive live webcasts. Our famed TAs also offer office hours throughout the week. We help arrange meet-ups and in-site study groups. If you are curious about the ModPo team, type "ModPo YouTube introduction" into Google or your favorite search engine, and watch the 20-minute introductory video. You will get an overview of the course and will meet the brilliant TAs, who will be encountering the poems with you all the way to the end. If you use Facebook, join the always-thriving ModPo group: from inside Facebook, search for "Modern & Contemporary American Poetry" and then request to be added as a member. If you have any questions about ModPo, you can post a question to the FB group and you'll receive an almost instant reply. We tweet all year long at @ModPoPenn and you can also find ModPo colleagues using the hashtag #ModPoLive. ModPo is hosted by—and is housed at—the Kelly Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia USA. All ModPo'ers are welcome to visit the Writers House when they are in our area. Our discussions are filmed there. Our live webcasts take place in the famed "Arts Cafe" of the House. To find out what's going on at the Writers House any time, just dial 215-746-POEM.
watch video on Baraka's "How You Sound??"
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)
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From the lesson
chapter 7 (week 6)—breaking conformity: the beats
<p><b>Week 6 starts at 9 AM (Philadelphia time) on Sunday, October 14, 2018, and ends at 9 AM on Sunday, October 21, 2018.</b>For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 6 materials are open and available all year.</p><p>The so-called “New American Poetry” that emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s went in many directions; some trends, styles, and approaches overlapped, while some were (or seemed to be) more distinct and separable than others. The “Beat” poets were a fairly distinct community of writers, making it easier than it would be otherwise to study as a coherent movement their ecstatic, antic, apparently anti-poetic break with official verse culture. Our approach, in just one week, looks at two “classic” Beats (Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac) and then quickly moves off to adjacent figures. Robert Creeley was not a Beat poet, but his most famous poem engages poetic, psychological, and social matters with which Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the others were obsessed. Anne Waldman is an “outrider” poet and is more closely associated with the second generation of “New York School” poets (see chapter 8), but she was a dear friend of Ginsberg and learned a great deal from his political pedagogy. Amiri Baraka, as Leroi Jones, was a Beat poet for a few years and then broke away. The poem by Baraka that we study here gives us a chance to look back on Countee Cullen's traditionally formal poetic response to racist hatred. The prose-poem/manifesto by Baraka on how poets (should) sound extends a theme already important to this chapter: the primacy of sound (or music) as a form of freedom from linguistic convention. Jayne Cortez gives us a perfect example of this and permits us to suggest connections among the Beat aesthetic, Black Arts, the influences of jazz, and the emergence of “spoken word” performance. Our focus on Jack Kerouac in chapter 7 is a little unusual — he, of course, is known more as a novelist than a poet. But his “babble flow” has been a significant influence on contemporary poets, more than his narrative fictional stance as psycho-social itinerant. We will have occasion, then, to examine and question Kerouac’s — and implicitly, Ginsberg’s — claim to be writing naturally spontaneous language. Our chapter 9 poets for the most part doubt such a claim. </p><p><b>ASSIGNMENTS:</b> During this week there are two quizzes due (see below). There are no writing assignments due, nor peer reviews. There is a live webcast on Wednesday, October 17, at noon (Philadelphia time).</p5
Meet the Instructors
Al FilreisKelly Professor, Dir. Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Faculty Dir. Kelly Writers House
LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka as LeRoi Jones, wrote a piece for an anthology
cover called the New American Poetry 1945 to 1960 edited by Donald Allen.
This book, this book is a crucial anthology in a way
is sort of a descendant of the choices that Donald Allen made.
And in that book, LeRoi Jones got to
be one of the few people to contribute a prose, a programmatic prose statement.
And the prose statement that he published in 1960 in this book, written in 1959 when
the book was being put together, published in 1960, is called How You Sound.
And How You Sound is one of the few programmatic statements for
the new American poetry.
So, let's just talk about the title for a second, and
then I might try to read the second and third paragraphs, and then go from there.
So, How You Sound, Dove, how do you parse that?
How you sound, question mark, question mark.
>> Well I think it could be read as sort of a slang utterance.
But I just think of sound as a double meaning.
Because sound can not just talk about auditory things we hear.
But sound also means something that's valid, or
verified, or has some heft to it.
So, I think that's one.
>> Is there a third meaning of sound?
Molly? >> Yeah,
it can be a verb like sound off or sound the trumpets.
>> Or sound the barbaric yawp.
>> Yeah. [LAUGH]
>> Over the rooftops of the world.
>> Does Ginsberg use that phrase, sound?
>> Walt Whitman does.
>> Walt Whitman. >> Whitman.
>> Walt Whitman Yeah, good, okay so you're laughing because I forgot my Whitman.
>> [LAUGH] >> No.
Okay Emily.
What about sounding, that is to say, getting to the bottom of something?
We have Jack Kerouac, with probably the closest statement allied with
this piece in ModPo is Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, A List
of Essentials by Jack Kerouac, which we're encountering in this week of ModPo.
And he writes, blow as deep as you want to blow,
which is really consonant with what Baraka's saying here.
And also, write what you want bottomless, from bottom of mind.
Take a sounding.
So there is already, and really for the first time in ModPo,
it's made very emphatic, there's a relationship between sound,
the sound of the poet's voice, orality and getting to the bottom of things.
It's a very important thing.
Okay, great so I'm going to read the first, the second and third paragraphs and
we'll see what happens here.
My poetry is whatever I think I am.
Can I be light and weightless as a sail?
Heavy and clunking like eight black boots?
I can be anything I can.
I make a poetry with what I feel is useful, and
can be saved out of all the garbage of our lives.
What I see, am touched by, can hear, wives, gardens, jobs,
cement yards where cats pee, all my interminable artifacts, all are a poetry,
and nothing moves with any grace, pride apart from these things.
There cannot be a closet, poetry, unless the closet be wide
as God's eye, and all that means that I must be completely free
to do just what I want in the poem, all is permitted Ivan's crucial concept.
There cannot be anything I must fit the poem into.
Everything must be made to fit into the poem.
There must not be any preconceived notion or design for what the poem ought to be.
Who knows what a poem ought to sound like until it's thar,
says Charles Olson, who, editorial insert, is represented
also in one of the prose statements in this book, in this anthology.
And I follow closely with that, with what Olson said.
I'm not interested in writing sonnets, sestinas or anything.
Only poems.
If the poem has got to be a sonnet,
unlikely though, or whatever, it'll certainly let me know.
The only recognizable tradition a poet need follow is himself and
with that say, all those things out of tradition he can use,
adapt, work over into something for himself to broaden his own voice with.
You have to start and finish there your own voice, how you sound.
Okay.
Yeah.
>> [LAUGH] >> So pick anything from there Amarise,
let's go with it, anything from what I just read.
>> So instead of starting from the constraints of the poem,
he's advocating for taking from his natural surroundings, environments,
experiences, any part of his experience in order to construct the [INAUDIBLE] poem so
it's a different ground.
>> Crucial point, so it's worth saying again.
It's a reversal.
Even the romantics, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and so
forth who were revolutionaries in poetry by using common materials,
even they used received poetic forms, typically.
There was obviously a lot of blank verse in Wordsworth.
But the poems for which they are famous took the common material,
the garbage, they wouldn't use the word garbage,
the garbage of our lives and put them into a form.
And Amarise, I invite you to say again,
Baraka is saying something fundamentally different, and what is it?
>> Rather than obeying the metrics of those traditional forms, he's saying that
sound should come from the people first, how we naturally engage with the world.
>> And then next after that is,
first you get the sound of what's out there, and then you do what?
>> You find your form.
>> Then you find the form that's appropriate.
Could it be a sonnet according to LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka?
>> It could be if the- >> It could be, though unlikely.
ModPo really takes his pot shots against science, doesn't it?
It could be a sonnet or whatever.
So let's talk about his relationship to that, to the way the form emerges.
How does it emerge?
Max, what does he say, if anything, about how we find the form?
>> Well the form kind of speaks to us.
There's almost this fantasy of going into the junk heap,
picking out the five things that you find and then they will make the form.
>> Really? >> No, it's-
>> Is he saying that?
Yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, but
he reminds me a lot of a Rauschenberg, or something.
Like they're sitting there, it's also a bit like Duchamp, right.
I mean you're just kind of finding these objects.
>> Ready mades.
>> And then these ready mades, yeah exactly.
>> Found objects. >> Yes.
And so it's very urban, it's very much about dwelling in waste and
refuse and stuff like that.
And it's very anti-romantic I think in that respect.
>> So let's refer to a few modernists because it's important for
Baraka's statement to be seen as in the line of modernism.
In a second when I stop blathering, we'll remember some of these.
You mentioned Duchamp, so that's very important.
You get modernism and
then an interregnum in which modernism was thought to have its problems, and then
you have the beats breakthrough with which Baraka as LeRoi Jones was associated.
Then the black arts movement, and then postmodernism.
There are lots of things feeding postmodernism,
to be sure, not just the black arts.
But the point is that Baraka is very literary here,
and he is standing in a line, right.
So looking back to Chapter 2 of ModPo, to the rise of modernism,
when he says I can make poetry with what I feel is useful and can be saved out of all
the garbage of our lives, who do you think of besides Duchamp?
>> Williams. >> Williams.
Which Williams, can you remember?
>> Between Walls >> Between Walls, exactly.
It's literal garbage.
Anything else?
Anybody else?
>> Whitman.
>> Whitman, for sure, yeah.
That's interesting.
And of course,
we know that Whitman is important to the Beats through Ginsberg, etc.
Any others?
Who else picks up garbage?
Who wears garbage?
>> Baroness Elsa?
>> The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who's a Dadaist.
And I think Dada really resonates with Amiri Baraka.
I think Dada is really important.
>> [CROSSTALK] >> And HD.
And then, within this chapter itself, Kerouac,
who likes to listen to what's being said around him.
And just battle with it, okay.
What else did you hear in those two paragraphs that I just read that's worth
commenting on?
>> What I was thinking to when Matt's talking about taking the found objects.
I think when he really emphasizes the form,
that the form emerges from these found objects.
What he's really talking about, the objects are language.
You start with language, you start with sound, and that's where you,
that's where the form emerges.
>> Language as sound, it sounds like.
Is this precise and scientific and rational?
I want to press you a little further.
How does the Roy Jones in 1960 want us to proceed?
How do we find the form?
Is it intuitive?
It is intuitive?
>> The reference to Olson, who- >> Charles Olson, yeah.
>> Charles Olson who wanted to use the breath as the unit of poetry.
>> Yes.
>> In opposition to meter.
It's saying that an opposite to meter in grammar with the title,
how you sound is how do you sound?
That yeah, the voice does start because, in the every day.
>> The voice is the bottom,
that's the bottomless spot that Kerouac is talking about.
Who knows what a poem ought to sound like until it's thar, says Olson.
What does he mean by that, Emily?
>> Until it's there?
>> Until it's there, yes, thank you.
So what does that mean?
Am I pushing too hard?
What kind of intuition get's us to the form of a poem?
Later in Chapter 9.3,
the conceptual poets are not going to talk about intuition in the least.
Kenneth Goldsmith is not interested in intuition.
And yet, he has a cousin relationship to this.
What's the cousin relationship?
>> That internal.
I think he's saying that you're not looking to tradition.
You're looking to what's within you.
>> I agree on that, for sure.
>> And it's coming from- >> And
if Goldsmith is not interested in what's inside.
>> Well, no, but I'm saying it's, what's inside is this, you were talking about,
this lineage that he's calling from.
>> Okay.
>> So what's internal is everything that you've read, everything that you've seen,
everything that you've touched.
>> Okay. >> You're,
it's emerging from that combination.
>> Okay.
>> I also think this looks forward.
But it really makes me think of McClow, and so.
>> Jackson McClow?
>> Yeah, so, when he says, where's his thar,
who knows what poem ought to sound like until it's thar.
Maybe instead of choosing, wracking your brain and choosing what you want to craft,
it's more of hearing everything and filtering what you want to hear.
And that's where the sound comes from.
>> Yeah, go ahead, Mike.
>> Okay, that's interesting because then there's this, I think you're right,
there is this sort of process of filtering that's not entirely.
That's very different from say Kenny Goldsmith
whether there is no filter essentially, right?
>> And there's no intuition.
>> And no intuition and different from Johnny Cage, too,
who would just want sound as you hear it, as you need it.
Whereas here, yeah, I think you're right, Ally.
He is sort of saying he's going to pick and choose certain things.
That there's still going to be this kind of like assembling or
building that's happening.
This sort of poetic work that's different from-
>> So we are something like halfway there,
to that post-modernity that we're going to end the course with.
I'll read a line and we can say more about it.
And with that say all those things out of tradition he can use, adapt, work over,
use, adapt, work over, into something for himself to broaden his voice with.
All right, comment on use, adapt, to work over, Dave.
>> I think it's interesting because it has a Kerouacian
feel of blow as hard as you want to blow.
But at the same time, it might be a little more thoughtful and
contemplative, because he's not saying- >> It wouldn't take much, maybe.
>> Good point.
>> To be more contemplative than Jack Kerouac.
>> He's saying that, well, Kerouac was saying screw tradition.
I don't care about it anymore.
Amiri Baraka is saying screw tradition, but we can still use it.
It's still there.
Take from it what you want.
Anything is fair game.
>> What you want.
We will define who we are and
be free if we choose what we want from that tradition.
He's not saying, chuck the tradition, he's saying, I want to adapt it.
Use, adapt, work over are phrases we get in chapter nine of this course, but
Baraka doesn't seem to fit there, and yet we're discovering that he does.
>> Well, he's saying that the only recognizable tradition a poet
need follow is himself.
So that means if you're going to use, if you're going to be kind of pushing
against or using tradition, or traditional forms, you're going to be experimenting
with those things, you only need to do the ones that resonate with you personally.
So he's kind of bringing up sides.
>> So that's very beat, very beat, personal freedom.
>> It's also very modernist too.
>> And modernist. >> [CROSSTALK] genius.
Both of the individuals not quite yet the >> Almost Steinian.
Yeah, so let's, starting with Molly, let's talk about sound.
I'm almost inviting us to put this down for
a second and put this text down and not look at it.
I'm going to turn over Ally's copy.
I've never done that before.
I just feel very powerful [INAUDIBLE].
If you want to see it, you can see it.
>> No, I'm- >> [LAUGH]
>> Let's talk about sound and
poetry because my poem needs, we need more sound.
We need more orality in my poem, we're very text, we're texty.
So, Moly start, what's important about sound?
>> Well, I'm thinking of Philemon and Bart and-
>> So, that's coming in chapter 9.1.
Okay. >> And the rhythm of the train and
the rhythm of the lines that he writes and I think that this,
although with much less constraint kind of echoes that because it's sort of chaotic,
it's sort of irregular in its rhythm, and
I think that that really echoes the urban setting.
So if you are able to read it aloud and get sort of the loud pops that come and
the pauses.
>> Mm-hm, good, let's keep talking about sound in poetry.
What's important about sound in poetry?
>> I think it's really important how much he emphasizes that
the poem does not dictate the form but the form dictates the poem because
you could read this piece as a per his poem of sorts but
it also kind of frees the poem from text.
So a poem could just be something spoken and never written down.
And I think that's really important for
a lot of the stuff that derives from maybe this sort of thinking.
>> Cool.
There is a pun when we say in the poetry world, contemporary poetry world,
when we say the poet's voice.
We mean two things.
What do we mean?
Name one.
>> [LAUGH] Maybe the.
The actual sound and regional inflections of the voice.
>> Yeah. The actual timber and
tonality of the thing that's created by the voice box.
A poet has a voice.
The late Amiri Baraka had a voice.
A voice that if you heard you would know it's his, a distinct voice,
a unique voice, I think is the phrase.
Okay, so but it's become in poetics more than just the actual sound.
Emily, what is it?
>> The individual genius.
>> The individual genius, even if it's not sounded, is referred to as the voice.
If we sent you off instead of sending you to Yale University to get a PhD,
we sent you to the University of Iowa to get an MFA we would be,
we hope we would send Emily off to find her voice.
What would that mean?
>> To find myself basically, my sort
of pure, artistic id, I don't know.
[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> So Max, another what are we doing with
a what are we doing with the poet's voice >> Well,
the voice is also the style, right?
I think as written, not necessarily spoken,
not necessarily as this muse kind of inspiration.
How you can tell Williams from Stephens for
instance just by comparing a couple lines.
But what to make of sound.
[LAUGH] >> But Baraka is inviting us to think of,
he's inviting us to connect back the cliche of the poet's voice to
the voice of the poet to the sound of poet to broaden his own
voice with means yes to become a broader free identity.
>> But also in a sense right to
shout from the rooftops to speak to be loud to be heard.
>> And in that question how you sound I think like emphasizes a different kind of
process than a more typical question like what do you write or what do you read?
Or, or, what do you see, or what do you think.
These things like that, that are always what, what, right there, to kind of like,
pointing and trying to get us to do something more, let's say, content based.
So, how you sound, of course,
sending we're not always in control of how we sound, or how things sound.
And you have that how, like, that how that's like, this is happening in time.
This is a function of time.
[INAUDIBLE] >> Not what you said.
>> Yeah, what- >> It's not really important what you say.
What's important is how you say it.
And of course,
Baraka's reminding us that how you say it is fundamentally how your voice says it.
Yeah, so this is chapter seven.
Chapter six, the end of a sequence of chapters where
various doubts about modernism were expressed.
Chapter six was the so called new formalists of the 1950s.
Baraka, like Ginsberg and others among the beats seems to be addressing them,
when he says at the end of this piece and the diluted, D-I-L-U-T-E-D,
diluted formalism of the academy, the formal culture of the US,
is anemic and fraught with incompetence and unreality.
Dave, I guess that's kind of obvious, but
do you want to summarize what he's saying there?
>> Well, this goes a little bit off of what Max said.
Because I think I've just taken a step back but if you think about communication,
you have the written word and you have the spoken word.
And he's equating the Academy with just the written word.
But if you think about communication, you can read something but when you speak it.
That's where you can put emotion into it.
That's where you can flavor it and
you can give it much more meaning than just the words on the page.
>> So one of the questions is,
can the academy handle a with the voice of the writer?
You know, can academic writing or
soundings tolerate this and I guess he's saying no.
All right I want to invite fine words, real quick, from everybody
because this is a, you know it's a short piece but there's a lot we didn't cover.
So say anything you want by way of wrapping up, and we'll start with Max and
we'll end with Emily.
>> I think this is an interesting, this is definitely an interesting [INAUDIBLE]
>> Towards the conceptualist and
postmodernist [INAUDIBLE] toward people.
And I think that because he is sort of challenging,
he's [INAUDIBLE] about sentences, right?
So he wants to re-emphasize the oral.
He wants to re-emphasize what some people will call a sort of Dionysian Senses or
something, or just this idea of even like rummaging around in the trash.
So the sovereignty of the romantic eyes completely going on here.
It's all about like in the trash listening for your favorite piece of trash.
>> [LAUGH] >> Or smelling it, too.
That's also [INAUDIBLE].
>> And associating that with freedom and voice.
>> Right, yes, but also associating that.
That becomes production and creation.
>> Very liberating.
Molly? >> [COUGH]
>> I think it's sort of a prefer,
a preface, rather, to the musicality of Jane Cortez and
some of the other non-black poets that we'll see later, and
how they really pull from jazz, with the music, From different cultures and
it becomes like, much looser, much more >> So important, such an important point.
The convergence of beat excess on the level of the line combined with beat and
black arts interest in jazz as a music behind which the poetry can function.
And the liberation of the identity through the voice all leads us from black art.
From beats to black arts to spoken word movement which is huge and
not something that we've talked about much otherwise.
So, very important.
This is importantly and Jane Cortez will get us even further down the line.
Hannah, final thought?
>> This just really resonates with me.
I just want to go out and write some stuff.
[LAUGH] I want to go do it.
>> It makes you write.
>> Yeah. >> Which is what
Don Allen probably had in mind when he put it in the back of the book.
This is a programmatic thing.
Now do the program.
>> Do it for real.
But I love when you think about someone like Kerouac who's just Who wants
it to be so automatic.
Like don't think about it.
Just do it.
And just write.
Who was it that said what wasn't writing, it was just typing?
>> Right.
>> This seems to almost take a step back from that, but in a really good way.
In a way that suggests writing isn't just this automatic thing.
It's a process of culling, of cultivating.
Of taking everything and being aware.
>> Captivating, great word.
>> Being aware of all these things that you've read and heard and
experienced and that's what goes in the poem, and that's where you find your.
>> Cultivation.
I like that.
Allie?
>> Yeah, and going back to the the two different tenses of voice.
You kind of have, if there's a direction that,
then you start off with your inner voice.
You're kind of autistic as Emily said, and
then you've write whatever you write, but then there's this
other stuff of getting that to people in actually speaking, your voice.
And so, I think this is really important in
looking ahead to more performative poetry.
Where as, I think you were saying it, it might not even matter what is being said,
but how you're saying it.
And maybe the greatest poem is completely uninteresting
if read just completely flatly and passionate, like just without passion.
And maybe as I think we'll see you can repeat one word over and
over and if modulate your voice in certain ways it will be awesome so.
>> That's so interesting.
A little footnote that may not be that helpful but
when the chapter 9.3 poet Kenneth Coalsmith does an entire
book of poetry which simply reproduces the traffic report so it's called traffic
when he reads that you'd expect him to read it in a John Ashbery flat voice.
He actually reads it as if it's a wonderful spoken word performance.
Taking what was already dull, the traffic report, and
turning it into a poetic feat of voice.
So it follows what you were saying about that.
Okay, Dave.
>> I think the first paragraph is really interesting and
informative because it starts with how you sound.
Which could be a slang arguments.
It could almost be equated with something like babble flow.
But then it's followed by a really intellectual,
contemplative, talking it mentions Zeitgeist and how to carry on.
He's basically showing that there is potential for
babble flow but there's a lot of thought that goes behind it.
>> Great, Andres?
>> Yeah, I think it's this wonderful dismissal that's words worthy in
principle, sort of calming and quelling your emotions in order to fit them and
flatten them on the page sort of more >> Of sound and
affect that he's calling for.
>> Mm-hm, well said.
Emily?
>> Well, the last sentence makes me wonder if this community, our
community of learning, might be anemic and fraught with incompetence and unreality.
>> [LAUGH] >> Considering we are,
after all sitting University.
It's a call, I think, for communities of learning to
model themselves after the material that they're teaching.
And I hope, and I believe, that ModPo is answering that call.
>> Wow. >> [LAUGH]
>> Well, your final thought makes me
think of this.
The reason that I really like this piece by Amiri Baraka is that
he gets me to think that poetry should be less about interpreting it.
Finding out what it means.
Then about the making and doing of it.
Making I think we understand.
We compose things in a process.
And it's important for us to understand the process.
The how.
But poetry that does things.
Rather than sitting around and worrying about what it means,
we should figure out how it was made and what it does.
And I think Mary Baraka by focusing on the human voice and
its connection to a free body is heading us in that direction.
So I guess down with down with this table, down with the academy.
>> [LAUGH] >> Up with ModPo.
>> [LAUGH]
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