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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)

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University of Pennsylvania

Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)

165 ratings

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.

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

watch video on the first section of Ginsberg's "Howl" (part 1)18:38

watch video on the first section of Ginsberg's "Howl" (part 2)13:41

watch video on Kerouac's ideas about prose19:08

watch video on these instances of Kerouac's "spontaneous prose"24:37

watch ModPo TAs debate spontaneity & first thought/best thought11:30

watch video: can we do a close reading of babble flow?6:52

watch video on Bob Kaufman's "Jail Poems"30:03

watch video on Creeley's "I Know a Man"14:18

watch video on Waldman’s “Rogue State”12:19

watch video on Baraka's "Incident"15:46

watch video on Baraka's "How You Sound??"25:52

watch video on Jayne Cortez's "She Got He Got"30:04

Meet the Instructors

Al Filreis
Kelly Professor, Dir. Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Faculty Dir. Kelly Writers House

We concluded our discussion of how by talking about conforming to the rhythm of

thought, which is not a paradox but still difficult.

Jack Kerouac, who is known as a novelist,

primarily, very much a beat writer,

spent a lot of time thinking about spontaneous prose and that paradox.

So now, we're going to look at some of his ideas in a document called Essentials of

Spontaneous Prose and another document, which is a list called Belief and

Technique for Modern Prose List of Essentials.

So let's just look at a few of these things.

All right, so Max, set up.

When it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image object,

the objects set before the mind, sketching, set in memory where it

becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image object.

Do you have anything to say about how that might work?

>> It's really interesting phrasing, there's a lot going on.

The object of writing is treated here as though

it were something that you were sketching.

>> Sketching as in pictorial?

>> Pictorially, yeah, so he's taking a kind of visual approach to it.

>> Mm-hm, remind you of anything?

A manifesto that we might have seen earlier?

In some ways it's a bit like Tender Buttons.

>> Yes, it's like the Indigenous Manifesto, with its focus on the image.

A definite image object, so there's not only a fantasy here.

Sorry to use that word.

There's not only a, I'll say fantasy.

There's not only a fantasy of spontaneity, of being able to

bypass languages, natural inhibitions or constraints,

but of the similar fantasy that the images had of definiteness.

>> Yeah. >> An image object.

What's the great thing, what's the positive thing, Max, really quickly about

seeing something you'll describe in words as an image object?

What's a good thing about that, what's fortunate about that?

>> Well, he's combining image with object, so theme with representation.

Which I think is sort of inline with the modernists that we've seen so far, that

in some ways, there is a bit of fantasy, as you said, of bypassing language.

He's also recognizing that the object is its representation.

That is what we get at all times.

>> And also that the word, if done this way, can be thought of,

as itself, an object.

Right, so that language becomes material.

Okay, Molly and Anna, let's talk about the next one.

Time being of the essence and the purity of speech.

Sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind,

of personal secret idea words blowing as per jazz musician on subject of image.

Molly, your thought on this?

>> Well, if time is of the essence in the purity of speech,

you can't wait until later to write about something you've seen.

>> Nice, do it now.

>> The language needs to be an undisturbed flow, so you sit and

you let everything out, write it all down before you can stop.

>> From where?

>> From the mind of personal secret idea words.

>> Mm-hm, why secret?

Either of you.

>> Secret I guess, if you think about Ginsburg being ashamed and

yet confessing it.

It's these things that, maybe you can't say in

just normal discourse, but- >> This kind of writing allows you

to say everything truthfully.

A word that Ginsburg used was frank and frankness.

Kerouac was less shy than Ginsburg.

>> I think sketching language is kind of all important, too.

because when you think about kind of the motion of sketching, it's very loose.

>> Yeah.

>> And you're just looking at something and

just getting it down the best that you can.

>> All right, and the two of you, what about blowing as per jazz musician?

Blowing on, I love that idiom, blowing on something.

>> [LAUGH] Well with a trumpet or a horn, you blow,

but you press the different buttons.

I don't anything about the actual [LAUGH] instrument.

>> Those buttons, yes.

>> I played piano.

>> I think they called them stops before, whatever, valves.

Probably more saxophone then trumpet, but either one.

>> Okay, but you, with the effort of the blowing, you also choose different

notes to sort of get all around your subject, your piece of music.

And I feel like it's sort of the same thing with writing,

only it comes through your fingers.

>> It's a difficult analogy, because while superficially,

standing back from it, you can see writing spontaneously as like bop,

jazz, with its riffs and spontaneities.

When you actually think about the blowing, it's hard to create the analogy, right?

So the instrument is to what in writing?

Not clear, right?

Maybe a typewriter or something.

Blowing, we know in jazz you need the breath, where's the,

I don't know the answer to this question, so good luck.

>> Well, to me, blowing seems like it's a pretty simple act.

You're just like, if you're blowing out birthday candles,

you just blow as hard as you can.

>> Yes. >> But

when you're blowing into an instrument, there's a lot of consciousness there,

even if it is spontaneous, you're consciously manipulating.

>> Okay, so the analogy is to consciousness.

>> That it's there.

Maybe it's spontaneous because you don't know maybe what notes you're playing, or

where you're going to go next.

But you're still manipulating the keys in a certain way.

>> Anybody want to try this?

Blowing, it's an analogy.

So blowing in the area of jazz improvisation is like what,

in the area of writing?

What's the equivalent of blowing or of breathe?

>> Well writing spontaneously because you're writing in there.

But- >> I knew this

was an unanswerable question, I know that.

>> [LAUGH] >> But the problem is like what is

the equivalent?

Is it thinking?

Is it- >> It's-

>> There's no actual respiration in

inspiration.

>> It's writing spontaneously, because even though it's spontaneous,

you don't know what word's going to come next.

There's still manipulation of language.

>> But I also think- >> Could it also-

>> Like pen stroke?

>> Yeah.

>> It has to be something, the act.

I think for Kerouac, typing was a very important thing.

You know he famously, when he could, he typed on a teletype roll, so

that he didn't have to take any time, time being of the essence, to change the paper.

And so what I'm trying to get,

you're making it a little, you're making it happily easy.

I don't think there's an easy parallel.

And I think that's the problem here.

But that's what's so good about it.

Alright let's turn to Allie and Dave, not selectivity of expression, right?

Not selectivity, which is in quotes, but

following free deviation association of mind, into limitless blow on subjects,

sea of thought, blow as deep, as you want, Allie?

>> Well, that just says to me first of all, don't censor at all,

and that there, something about blow as deep as you want.

Especially just because of, maybe the sexual connotation?

That just kind of says, there is nothing you should be afraid [CROSSTALK]

>> Go all the way.

But let's get back to selectivity of expression.

Is that possible?

No selectivity expression.

I'm not going to do it, because I don't want you to be committed to this.

But I could ask you to speak without any selectivity,

or to write without any selectivity, what is that?

Is that possible?

>> Well I've tried to do free association or just,

I've tried to do this type of writing, and it's really, really hard, I think.

And, so especially the challenge, I think comes from maybe the fact that

we've been trained, most of us for entire lives to be selective and

to be thoughtful [CROSSTALK] >> What are some examples of selectivity

and expression, anybody?

Just quick, examples.

>> Saying, choosing one synonym for another.

>> Okay, word choice.

Keep going, Max?

Examples of selectivity, you're doing it now.

>> Syntax, sentence structure.

>> Syntax?

>> If you're writing a certain poetic meter, you have to pick certain words that

will fit into- >> Okay, that's a-

>> That's super selective.

>> And that's a very basic thing.

>> Subject matter.

>> Subject matter, right.

You stay on the subject.

>> In a larger sense, it's thinking about your audience.

Not saying the wrong thing.

>> Thinking about who the audience is, thinking about staying on message.

Emily, you've been thinking about this.

>> Even just the decision to speak or not speak is kind of [CROSSTALK]

>> The decision to speak or not speak.

He is, again, fantasizing, he is imagining what is probably theoretically impossible.

You said it was really hard to do.

My thought would be it's impossible to do, but it's a great goal.

Following free deviation, this is Emily Dickinson saying,

the brain within it's groove runs evenly and true, but let a splinter swerve,

were easy for you to put a current back when floods have slipped the hills.

The mind will go where it's going to go, and this is following that free deviation

association of mind, and limitless blow on subject seas of thought.

All right, Amareese and Emily lag in procedure I love this.

No pause to think of proper word, no pause.

But the, let's get to the second parts in a minute,

no pause to think of proper word.

That's similar to what we were just talking about, Amareese.

>> So I was saying let go of that selectivity, be uncensored,

listen to that intuitive source within yourself.

>> Mm-hm, there's a word lag, and there's a word pause.

Emily, what does that suggest?

>> Pause implies something intentional,

lag implies something that sort of happens on accident.

A sort of system breakdown.

>> Amareese, pause and lag, what part of the world are these words from?

>> Pause is conscious.

They both deal with movement, so he's talking about the movement and

flow of thought.

>> They also both deal with time.

>> Yes, yeah.

>> Pause, lag.

No lag, no pause.

Go, do it.

First thought, best thought.

And now we'll get to the second part of this.

No pause to think of proper word, but the infantile pileup

of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained.

Explain that.

>> The way I interpreted it, he's saying that children embrace that

sort of improper, they even delight in an indecent cluster of-

>> What are you saying?

>> Like image association.

>> You're being too selective in your thought.

Emily, come on, be scatological.

What is this a reference to?

You mean what, the word scatological disorder?

>> No, this whole thing.

The infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained.

What is this a reference to?

Why are you guys so shy?

We're talking about the beats, you're wearing black.

>> Masturbation?

>> No, [LAUGH] my goodness, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Max come on, help us out here.

>> Well, I mean if we think of Freud.

>> [LAUGH] >> Children before they're potty trained,

before they're taught otherwise have no problem just

shitting to their hearts content.

>> Yes but there's, but there's, no.

That's true, that's true, that's true.

>> Yeah, so satisfaction is gained.

>> But this is, the children let it go.

This is about the pile up.

This is not necessarily about children, literally.

This is about how infantile it is to be an adult.

What, do I have to say this?

Who holds it all in, constipation.

>> Yes.

>> Pause, lag.

I've got to get to my desk.

I've got to get my sonnet book out.

I've got to I've gotta get it just right.

I'm going to wait, I'm going to.

I have to do it, I have to do it.

>> [LAUGH] >> And [SOUND] and satisfaction is gained.

Well he thinks that is a, all right, see there I did it.

>> [LAUGH] >> He believes that that is the wrong way

to go, right?

If you gotta go, go man.

Go, one of his favorite words.

And one of the Beat Generation's favorite words is go, let's go.

No pause to think of proper word.

Don't take that thing that your body is producing, the blowing,

the air, the speech, the spontaneity.

Don't pile that up until you get to the point where you're,

finally I wrote it, and satisfaction is gained.

That is a theory.

It is quasi-Freudian.

He is being anti-Freudian.

Let's not have a situation where we create this relation between id and ego, where

the id does its fabulous thing and the ego makes sure it gets really constrained,

and you have no sense of the poopiness of what you're producing.

Yeah, all right, let's look at the list, okay?

You all right? You ready for that?

Basically, if you've gotta go, go.

Belief in technique for modern prose, list of essentials.

Let's pick out some favorites.

Number 10. No time for poetry, but exactly what is?

Molly.

>> No time to force it into the rhyme scheme, or meter,

just exactly what the words are.

>> So the opposition is between poetry on one hand, and

exactly what is on the other hand, which sort of leaves poetry kind of in the dust.

Again, what would poetry be in that?

>> Like a formal constraint.

>> The opposite of exactly what is,

of course you want to embrace exactly what is, and no time for that.

>> No time for, meaning I have no time, I have no patience for it, but

also we don't have the time for it.

We have to do exactly what is there, again this ideal,

this impossible fantasy that language is what is, and

that poetry is what isn't, because you submit to constraint.

13, remove literary, grammatical, and syntactical inhibition.

That's fairly obvious, Annie, you want to say something about it?

>> Well it's kind of like what Stein was doing too, to break down syntax,

break down semantics.

And make new associations that come freely from your brain,

not from this word needs to come after that word because we have subject verb

direct object things in English.

>> Yeah, and it's not entirely what Stein was pointing in the direction of.

It's not possible to remove, it's possible to remove inhibition to some degree.

But not impossible.

It's impossible to remove syntax,

because all language is going to have some kind of syntax.

But we're going to meet John Cage in chapter nine.

And we're going to listen to John Cage say,

I went around the country trying to make English less understandable.

Because when it's less understandable, we don't do bad things to each other.

And we can go about living our lives.

He too had this idealism, that syntax was like the army, he said.

All right, 14, like Proust, be an old tea head of time, Dave?

Proust, what Proust are we talking about?

>> To be honest, all these seem like they're saying the same thing,

just in different ways.

>> Yeah, well, that sounds like Jack.

Anyway, you're dodging the Proust.

What Proust are we talking about?

Joe Proust?

John Proust?

>> Marcell Proust.

>> Marcell Proust.

French modernist novelist.

Really, probably a model for it.

Kerouac's a novelist, so probably Proust is a modernist novelist, okay?

And what is Proust famous for?

>> Remembrance of Things Past.

>> Yeah, but what's his technique?

>> Sort of a time, free association almost, with different memories.

>> So it's typically non-sequential, associational.

Like Proust, be an old tea head of time.

Was Proust a tea head?

>> Sort of, he puts the madeleine in the tea.

>> Literally tea.

But I don't think that's what Jack meant by tea head.

>> Kerouac.

>> Tea head, you might as well spell that out, Max.

>> Sure. >> What's a tea head?

>> Tea head is what they used to say for pot head.

>> Yeah, pot head.

>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Right, pot head.

So he's thinking about the way in which that associational,

non-narratitivity, or anti-conventional narrativity

is aided by marijuana, I guess is what he's saying.

21, struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind,

we've been saying this, but let's try it again, Allie?

>> Yeah, it kind of goes back to the rhythm of thought.

And the sense that you can never be wrong if you're

kind of doing this type of writing because

the product is almost already given internally.

You just have to kind of access it.

>> It exists in tact.

>> Yeah. >> Why mess with it if it exists in tact?

>> So again, there's the body or the blowing,

seems to be a transmission through a transparent language, or

through a language that doesn't behave as an alienated thing, right?

So, thought becomes language without a lot of interference.

This is again, very difficult to imagine.

Let's do two more.

Don't think of words, number 22, don't think of words when you stop but

to see picture better.

And let's add 25 to that, write for the world to read and

see your exact pictures of it.

Both of them have to do with pictures.

Amareese, any thought on that?

>> I would say not a direct translation of subject,

the object just like we were talking about before with Stein.

But this idea of recreating the aura of the mood, the memory,

the tone of the image, so focused on the image.

>> Why don't you think of words?

Don't think of words.

>> because we're not trying to have that comprehensible,

direct discourse that he's writing against.

>> One imagines that when Ezra Pound had that experience in the metro

station in Paris, that he was reaching for something like this.

This is something like that instant in time which is imagistic and

not linguistic.

Though what he ends up is a precise linguistic.

Okay, one more.

You're a genius all the time, Max?

>> Well, it's like I'm sounding like it's something out of a self-help book.

>> [LAUGH] >> Yeah, it really does, certainly.

>> It is interesting, because he is sort of destabilizing the idea of genius,

that we are all geniuses, and we're all geniuses all the time.

>> We're a genius if we blow deeply,

if we- >> Sure,

yeah we all have access to genius.

That genius isn't something that geniuses are endowed with,

rather than we can always tap into a genius at any time.

>> Use it to burn your flannel suit.

>> Well that's certainly what we have to do.

And we have to get rid of that dead poetry.

>> If you think that you're a genius all the time,

less I think would hold you back.

Because whatever you were doing would just be great.

>> Be in love with your life, he says.

Be crazy, dumb saint of the mind.

You just want to get up right now, and go do it, don't you?

Go.

>> Okay.

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