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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”)

157 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! Even though we are currently in our offseason ("SloPo"), you are welcome to enroll now. You will have access to the entire ModPo site. Explore; meet some ModPo'ers who are conversing in the site year-round; read poems and watch videos. Then join us again when the intense "symposium mode" starts up again in September. 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 4 (week 5 cont.)—the Harlem Renaissance

We continue ModPo week 5 with chapter 4 and Harlem Renaissance poetry. We look at poets whose concept of the relation between traditional stanza form and the content of racist hatred helps us understand the limits of formal experiment. For example, Harlem Renaissance writers such as Jean Toomer (in works like Cane) engaged a modernist sense of genre, and Sterling Brown closely studied and admired the modernist “New”-ness of Ezra Pound even though Brown chose to write his own poems in rhymed blues verse and sometimes vernacular "folk" language. Claude McKay's strategic use of the Shakespearean sonnet is as powerful a refusal of free verse as can be found anywhere — his sense of the complicated inheritance of English prosody will come back to us at the very end of the course (watch for it in week 10). Countee Cullen uses the ballad form to similar effect, and for similar reasons. These poets, and others such as Langston Hughes, emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, but the influence of what was called “The New Negro” artistic renaissance (after the anthology compiled by Alain Locke) extended well beyond its time and deeply influenced later poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, whose poems “truth” and "Boy Breaking Glass" we will also read and discuss here in chapter 4. Brooks's idea of the truth is honored but also challenged, in turn, by a poet still later associated with the Black Arts movement: Etheridge Knight. Knight's response to Brooks (discussed in the PoemTalk episode linked to this week's syllabus) both reveres Brooks and at the same time urges further progress, just as Brooks's “truth” had revered and also moved beyond the McKay/Cullen mode. In "Boy Breaking Glass," Brooks understands a young man's "cry for art" as requiring a sympathetic modernist fragmentation in her own poem. Poetic influences are cultural ripples, never more so than here — an emanation but also a widening. Langston Hughes's “Dinner Guest: Me” is partly about how such ripple effect and communality sometimes must be taught. And because it must be taught, we felt it apt to add a special video (prepared for ModPo's Teacher Resource Center) on how teachers might teach that challenging poem by Hughes.

watch video discussion of Cullen’s “Incident”16:06

watch video on McKay's "If We Must Die"19:26

watch video on Hughes's "Dinner Guest: Me"18:59

watch video on teaching Hughes’s “Dinner Guest: Me”20:00

watch video on Brooks’s “Boy Breaking Glass”27:34

Meet the Instructors

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

So let's talk about Dinner Guest: Me, which is in 1951 poem by Langston Hughes.

And we read this poem in a context of the Harlem Renaissance in [INAUDIBLE].

And we're talking about teaching this poem.

Which is an interesting conversation for

us to have because we teach the poem on the syllabus in [INAUDIBLE].

But we've also all encountered this poem outside of and

I think we all have ideas and feelings about

the issues surrounding teaching this poem, in different classroom contexts.

It's kind of a pedagogical poem in itself.

It's a scene of teaching.

The speaker is kind of there to teach his audience at this dinner table

on Park Avenue.

And then the poem itself is doing some pedagogical work.

So lots of layers.

>> It's a metapedagogical poem.

>> It's a metapedagogical poem, metapedagogical poem.

>> For sure.

>> And Emily Harnett in the video for

this poem in fact calls it a pedagogical failure.

And that's a remark I find fascinating so

at some point I hope we can get to that and consider what that might mean.

So can we talk a little bit about how we would approach this poem in the classroom?

>> Well, I think as a white instructor of largely students of color,

I would do that thing, that I do often because I'm not as controlling.

Just sort of let somebody read it.

Let's read it a couple times, and then you guys go,

tell me what you see happening here.

Let's talk about it and my job would be to ask questions and be a guide.

And I think I would stand to learn a lot, actually from my students.

So in a way I would really want to flip the teaching.

Then what do I expect to come up?

I personally think that this poem is wry, witty.

It's full of irony right, I think it's funny like it's tragic.

>> What are the funny moments for you?

>> Well you know he's sitting at dinner with white people who

are you know he says he's a what the why and where with all of darkness USA right?

So that's me even the title of Dinner Guest: Me.

Right, and even the word me has an ending.

It's like me, smile, me.

>> [LAUGH] And darkness USA- [CROSSTALK] >> And I am darkness USA, which is-

>> Almost like a throw away line,

it's gotta be read ironically.

>> It's absolutely kind of- >> It's really mocking.

>> Bitterly silly, yeah, bitter silliness.

He's mocking the gravity of which these other dinner guests are speaking of this

so called [CROSSTALK] problem.

>> Yeah, I'm like a ghost, darkness USA, something like that right.

Wondering how things got this way in current democratic night

murmuring gently over fraises du bois.

I'm so ashamed of being white.

You know and

he has to sort of be the emissary, he is the emissary from darkness USA.

He's the representative and this is the kind of thing he has to hear.

But then we move to whats for dinner,

the lobster is delicious the wine divine- >> Divine is also funny.

>> Yeah exactly, well this is almost like how other people talk or something.

The wine divine you can just feel that right?

Being said by somebody else.

But he all agrees because he says to be a problem on Park Avenue at eight

is not so bad.

because he's having this wonderful dinner.

[LAUGH] >> Like if I have to do this well.

>> Right. >> It might as well be real.

These wonderful strawberries.

>> The food is great.

[SOUND] Right, like I have to hang out with white people and

deal with being dark Miss USA.

And they confess they're ashamed of me after they've had a couple

glasses of wine.

But the food is great over here on Park Avenue.

But last lines, solutions to the problem, of course, wait.

>> I think that's what Emily [CROSSTALK] she said that the teaching doesn't work.

Because it's impossible to be set up to teach in a situation like this.

>> There's been no learning,

that no learning happens in this scene, nobody learns anything.

>> I mean, it's hard to say because wait isn't everything is terrible forever.

I think it's more like I'm doing this.

And I know a little bit about Hughes's orientation towards this.

He's one of these people like Zora Neale Hurston who's feeling like I have

to kind of hang out with white people, because we want to get along.

We want to kind of just have a culture of our own.

And they have their culture.

And we can talk and we just want to be equal.

So we gotta hang out.

We gotta be kind of be patient with them.

We'll work it out over time.

So I don't know if nobody is learning anything.

It's more like, this is going to be this ridiculously incremental,

painful, stupid thing.

Where I have to sit through these dinners and we'll see if we ever get anywhere.

But right now, you know what I mean?

So I don't know if it's a total failure?

I just think it's, meanwhile back in darkness USA

this is the problem is- >> And maybe the wryness,

as you pointed out of the poem is also what it, it's not a poem about

tragedy or it's not, there's not like, it's, there's not a lot of anger.

>> Yeah. >> Super legible in the poem or

overt in the poem, that wryness and even sarcasm.

>> Mm-hm.

>> Everything down to the pan of fraises du bois being

[INAUDIBLE] >> Right.

>> W-E-B du bois.

>> Mm-hm.

>> It's quite witty- >> Yeah.

>> And also kind of, you get the sense it was almost effortless.

>> Mm-hm, yeah, [LAUGH] right.

>> And [INAUDIBLE] very complicated poem, problem capital P.

>> Mm-hm.

>> Is referring to the political phrase,

the existing political phrase the Negro problem.

>> Yeah.

>> Which is easy to ironize at that time and now.

So, to be a problem on Park Avenue, P again.

Solutions to the problem.

So that is already bracketed by existing political language.

And the political language that turns out to be bullshit.

>> Mm-hm.

>> So lowercase would of been more less ironic.

>> Mm-hm. >> At the end, solution to the problem.

>> Mm-hm. >> So

interesting that he's done this amazing thing.

Usually, the upper case is the grander statement.

But it would be lower case, it would be the less ironic statements.

Quite, quite complicated.

And the more you know, not that I teach this way, but

my inclination is a literary historian, tends this way.

As a critic, as a scholar is to put in all the popular front background, which is,

of course, people were leftists.

And radicals and

change makers working together not withstanding skin color right?

>> Mm-hm. >> So that and

he was very much part of that in the 30s.

By the time you get to 1951.

>> He has praised communism behind.

He's actually testified for the housed of the American activities committee sadly.

Although it didn't mean a whole lot of names.

Putting that behind and the Negro problem which is a communist phrases, ironised.

But he's still in this activity you described unless,

he's recalling stuff from the 30's and doesn't do it anymore.

>> Which I think we know biographically that's not true.

He was very open to this.

This was also around the time of Invisible Man, which is often taught in our schools.

And the relationship between this kind of invisibility and

that kind of invisibility.

With again with the Communist Party and

with the character invisible who's trying to be part of the solution.

But he winds up having to be in a basement somewhere so-

>> And nameless too-

>> And nameless [CROSS TALK]

>> Students who know that book,

will have something to say about this poem.

And politically they are aligned the two of them are somewhat aligned at that

point.

There's so much going on here I do [INAUDIBLE] as a teacher.

>> Yeah.

Yeah, Erica, what are you thinking about?

>> It's an amazing poem but it's a really hard poem, so-

>> Like hard, what's hard about it?

>> I'm kind of stuck thinking about, like it's formally so

fascinating in all of the things that he is doing.

Where the first time you read it through, it's kind of like okay,

here's a fairly narrative poem that kind of makes sense.

>> It's a story.

>> It's a story, but- >> There's

a beginning, a middle, and an end.

>> Yeah, but it's not that easy, and >> I'm thinking about ways to

move students from that moment where it's like okay, it's all stray.

I get it.

Because I feel like there's all of the things that we've been saying and

the questions that we've been asking are things that I would hope to

come out of the student readings.

>> Mm-hm.

>> And then I was thinking about

probably pairing it with something else where the tone is vastly different.

Like James Baldwin,

it's a letter to his nephew.

It's called My Dungeon Shook, which it's pretty short, and

it's a beautifully written piece.

And it's very angry and kind of says, in a lot of ways, the opposite.

Takes the opposite approach or

has an opposite argument, as well as the opposite tone.

>> Opposite form, because it's a letter.

It feels very angry, but it's also written as a letter to his nephew.

On the anniversary

of emancipation.

So it's written out of a place of loving his nephew who's also his namesake.

But he's really like, these are the things that you can't let bring you down.

So I think that maybe just pairing a very different text with this poem might

open up some of the things that I think as a teacher, and as a white teacher.

And I also work with, or have worked with predominantly students of color.

That's something-.

I can't figure out how to phrase what I'm trying to say.

But it's something that I'm conscious of and I would want to bring in voices that

are not mine in order to shift the conversation out of my

hands because this content wise this is stuff I'm not.

>> You're not the very best person to speak to it.

>> Yes and I want to make sure that like there's room for a lot of perspectives.

>> Yeah, there's room for

a lot of prospectives and- >> I like the idea of pairing because I

was actually thinking when we did Mod Poet with LaGuardia Community College and

we supplemented later on with some.

The one poem, A Poem for Halfway College Students, brought up

a lot of I think the issues in here, but from a different perspective,right?

And it's essentially about race and performance.

And in A Poem for Halfway College Students, it's about what happens

when you go to university and you start picking up white culture and white speech

patterns and The refrain is kind of check yourself, check yourself, check yourself.

So halfway ends up,

it becomes clear that halfway is not about being like biracial or something.

It's about becoming, the anxiety of like becoming potentially white through

learning and engaging with white people.

But there's also not really a choice in the poem, so

you have to be checking yourself all the time.

I think that's an interest, that would be another kind of pairing you could do with

just to open up the performance and identity thing with race.

>> Another pairing,

another letter of course in a text that >> Lots of students know

would be Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from Birmingham jail where he as that

fabulous several pages about wait and it is rhetorically brilliant.

It's when this is going on and this is going on how could we possibly wait?

We are told to wait and wait gets repeated again and again paragraph after paragraph.

When it uses parallelism, which of course King was the best at.

Parallelism accumulates to the point where we no longer want to wait.

The reader's experience is to wade through this

powerful accumulation of this Terrible situation of the segregated South to

the point where the reader can no longer wait.

So he drags this thing out through the language and

we too are impatient and won't want to wait.

And it's a very different rhetorical use.

Different from the use of weight here.

>> Or is it, I don't even know now.

>> Though it shares some of the same tone eventually.

>> Now I'm thinking differently about what I said earlier, because I don't know,

maybe weight is ironic.

More Ironic than I thought.

>> King is not being ironic about Wade.

He's being sarcastic about the people who say hey,

wait, you'll get your freedom and your rights.

>> One thing at a time, one [CROSSTALK] at a time.

>> One thing at a time.

Well, the one step at a time approach here is, I'm going to go to these dinners.

But there's a seething anger about waiting.

>> Mm-hm. >> If I have to go to these dinners,

do I really have to wait?

Can we just not get this done?

>> Mm-hm. >> And so that's the frustration of what

Emily calls the failure of the pedagogical moment.

>> Yeah. >> Mm-hm.

>> Is very,

very powerful in that last word- >> I mean this also plugs into just so

many things about black art, right?

We can have you to dinner but we can buy your album, we can love your book,

but you cannot have the same job as me or the same wage as me, right?

The ironies of that.

I can be the black artist at your dinner table but

>> Then I go back and

[CROSSTALK] you feel really good about yourselves for having me to dinner.

>> In a poem, a black art out of the situation.

I am so ashamed of being white becomes the line of a poem.

>> Right, I'm thinking about hip-hop which Erica and

I were talking about on the way over here this morning.

Like the Beastie Boys were the first number one rap album, why is that?

So there's a reappropriation

in this poem which functions as a critique of that legacy.

>> Yeah. >> In the video Max is,

we all talked about this, but Max was particularly eloquent on the subject and

maybe we can talk about it because we began with meta pedagogical.

There is a way in which in the white finds herself or

himself in the poem as the diner,

essentially consuming Hughes as the dinner guest.

So can we, I mean what is a teachers supposed to do with that?

I guess it's a very difficult subject but.

>> Mm-hm.

Or we consume black culture like crazy.

American culture is so totally black culture, like half of what we're known for

is black culture.

The blues is black culture, hip hop is black culture.

>> So how does that figure us as a reader?

If a white reader figured here as suffering from I guess liberal guilt.

That's what's happening in the poem is does that happen to the white reader?

This is what Max was describing for himself.

>> Yeah. >> He was upset,

he found the poem to be powerfully and beautifully disruptive.

To his white subjectivity, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> To his status as a reader.

>> Success. >> Success.

>> [LAUGH] >> A conjugal win.

>> Discomfort is the space of- >> Maybe, yeah.

>> Learning.

>> Well, I mean, that's what you- >> It's clearly what Hughes is after.

>> Can ask for, I guess, right?

>> And the risk is reproducing the white liberal dinner table in your classroom.

>> Right.

>> Yeah.

>> The worst thing you can do is not intervene

if certain students are positioning

themselves as not at the dinner table.

You know what I mean?

Like if they are not- >> Say that again,

this is a really important point.

>> I think the reason we wanted to talk about this one again is we wanted to

grapple with the question of how to intervene if students are reading this

poem as if they have no place in it, especially white liberal students.

If they somehow think, this is 1951, this is decades away.

>> It was the times.

[CROSSTALK] >> This poem's actually incredibly

relevant to contemporary race politics in the United States.

And the ways in which we're not always trained to see ourselves in a poem.

>> Yeah, when I walked away from that video, or

that day when we made that video, I had a phrase ringing in my head.

And I really wished I had used it, in part, intervene, as you suggest.

And it was at the table, who gets to be at the table?

>> Right. >> Right, in a way in a discussion,

in a classroom discussion of this poem, the question is, who's at the table?

>> Mm-hm.

>> And that's become, in the 90s and aughts,

a phrase that means part of the political conversation.

Who gets to be actively part of the conversation,

and this poem really powerfully asks, do I get to be at the table?

I'm only at the table because at the sufferance of these folks who need me.

>> Also, is this the table?

[CROSSTALK] Is this the table where major civil rights gains will be made?

Are these the people who are going to make those decisions?

Is being at this table a sign of progress, or

is it actually incredibly regressive.

And we've been talking,

in this group, a lot about the kind of fiction of the decentered classroom.

How to assume that there's any possibility of decentering ourselves and

getting ourselves out of the seat of power in the classroom is

really a very liberal fiction.

So the question is, how do we approach a poem like this ethically or

a poem that raises- >> And

not merely perpetuate the liberal fiction, which is what the poem is skewering.

>> Right.

>> Wow, it's really complicated.

>> Yeah.

>> It's so interesting, this is such an often used poem, an anthologized poem.

And is it, in fact, anthologized in part because

of our desire to consume

it because it would be, in the case of the white consumer, about that consumption.

So in a way, I'm conflicted about it representing Hughes in mud puddles.

Even though it's a great poem, is it simply a poem that

a white instructor feels comfortable using because I'm at the table in the poem, but

then I'm skewered in the poem?

Skewer is a really funny word to use in the context of dinner, but.

>> [LAUGH] >> So it's meta, meta, meta.

[CROSSTALK] I mean, it just spirals away.

Does this make any sense, what I'm saying?

>> Yeah, but that's brilliant, the spiralling away is really brilliant.

>> Really on his part, not on my part.

>> Yes, that's what I'm saying.

>> I mean, that's what's getting me, so.

Am I reproducing that consumption accidentally?

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