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