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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 2.2 (week 3 cont.)—the rise of poetic modernism: Williams

Now in the second of four parts of our chapter on the rise of modernism—in the second part of week 3—we take a closer look at William Carlos Williams (1883-1963). We met Williams as a “Whitmanian” in chapter 1, the middle figure in a poetic line running from Whitman to Ginsberg. But that focus on him was a little misleading. The Williams of the late 1910s and 1920s was a poet fascinated by currents of formal experimentation—imagism, yes, but also Dadaism, cubism (especially drawing on innovations and painting) and a little later, objectivism. It's not the purpose of this course that we learn what all these “-isms” mean. Rather, let's start with a few poems by Williams that befit the imagist moment, and go from there. Quickly we'll find that Williams (always aesthetically restless) was interested in a writing that might capture the dynamism of its modern subject matter and was (mostly) willing to face problems created by traditional approaches to description and portraiture. When these conventions seemed to him to fail, he was prepared to include such failure in the poem itself—disclosing the troubled process of representation.

watch video on Williams's "Lines"10:00

watch video on Williams's "Between Walls"9:52

watch video on Williams’s “This Is Just to Say”12:12

watch video on Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow"12:49

watch video discussion on Duchamp’s “Fountain”10:31

watch video on Williams's "Portrait of a Lady"10:23

on Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase"11:49

Meet the Instructors

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

Between walls. William Carlos Williams.

Where are we? Where are we?

Who's a city person? Raised, born and raised in a city?

What city? >> And the store is manned.

>> What city? >> [laugh].

>> You raised your hand. >> Bee city.

>> Bee city? >> Yeah, in New York.

>> William spent a little time in New York.

I mean, he went to high school at Horace Mann.

He spent a lot of Friday nights. >> My rival high school.

I'm just saying. >> Your rival high school.

He went, Friday night's he'd go in and hang out with the Baroness, when she

wasn't slugging him in the face. >> [laugh].

>> And he also went to school in Philadelphia, for med school, to the

university of Pennsylvania. Anyway, that's all nonsense.

Where are we? >> We're kind of behind the hospital.

I kind of imagine it to be almost like, an air shaft or something.

>> Back wings, yeah. How, how do urban hospitals get built

typically? Are they well planned, coordinated, all

of, all the building takes place at once? There's never any sudden additions.

>> No. I think, I mean, depending on when the

hospital was built that you have to take them into account what's already there.

So, it's probably crammed you know, not ideal.

>> Things get, it's, it's, it's the sort of not a planned architecture.

So. So, this is a built environment.

This is the environment that, that William's aesthetic thrives in.

This is probably in Paterson, New Jersey. The hospital he's associated with, famous,

he's famous for doing his rounds and then going out to the deck or porch or a place

where he could overlook these kinds of scenes and he would scribble his poems.

So, Kristen, what's the valuation of resonance, the connotation of this place

in our lives. We have places like this.

>> So, for us I think it's very undesirable.

You don't want to, if you're at a hospital visiting someone the last place you wanna

go and relax is in the air shaft with the cinders.

>> Oh, interesting. Specifically with respect to hospitals, it

would be bad enough if this were a place where a wedding reception was taking place

but this is much worse because of all the death.

>> Mm-hm. Yeah, so it's already a depressed,

depressing environment, the hospital itself.

>> The hospital isn't. >> Usually, unless you're going to visit a

baby. >> The dead space is even deader.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

Unless you are going to visit a baby and of course Williams would deliver babies

and he hung around babies and he was a pediatrician and so, he's full of life,

but I suppose this is really about death, the back wings of the hospital where

nothing will grow. Molly, why won't anything grow?

>> Because there's probably not a lot of sunlight.

It's probably just concrete. And it's sort of where people throw out

things they're discarding, like the cinder.

>> What do you imagine today, at least. Though there's a lot less smoking.

I imagine, I imagine, cigarette butts. What else?

>> Trash from food wrappers. >> Food wrappers, right.

>>, All the people visiting the hospital toss their stuff out there.

These are dead spaces in our built environment.

Nothing will grow. >> But in this space lie cinders in which

shine, oh shine, Emily, what is shine, give me the evaluation of the word shine

typically in our lives. >> It's typically good, it's money, it's

beauty, it's, it's pretty thing there. >> Shine is positive, it's light.

Tell me about light in painting or light in photography.

Anybody do? Know anything about that?

>> That's all. >> [crosstalk] >> Not.

Well. Well, what do we, why, how important is

light to photography? >> It's very important.

>> It's everything. >> Yeah.

>> Without light. >> You don't have an image.

>> Be a little more specific. Anyone, without light?

>> Well, the amount of time you allow light to filter in completely affects what

can be captured. >> Light is everything.

Without light, you don't have distinction. You don't have separation between objects.

And you don't have the shine, right? Nothing will shine without light.

So we do have some light here. Nothing, where nothing will grow lie

cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle.

>> Anna, what's, what's happened? Tell us the little story.

>> Williams is taking a walk after his, his rounds and he's walking by the gross

back wings of the hospital, and he just, the, the light just like catches on a

broken piece of glass, and he like sees that as just like beautiful.

And I really hesitate to, to use the word beautiful.

>> Why, why do you hesitate? Have you been socialized to think of this

as ugly? >> No, it's just that, that.

Beautiful is kind of loaded terms. I just, I just think that he, he sees this

and he's just drawn to it because it catches the light and it just, there it

is. And he sees this moment of, and he isn't

over that, he has to, to use perfection, in this, in the light on this.

>> Uh-huh. >> Grey bottle.

>> The. If it's perfection it would be ironic,

given that it's broken. >> Sure.

>> Right. So what?

Max, can we speak generally about an aesthetic?

This is a modern aesthetic. That privileges what's broken as opposed

to what's whole. That sees life.

That's what's really going on here, right? That sees life among cinders in a dead

space, where nothing will grow. Very similar to the, the green poem, that

we talked about called Lines. >> I think this is.

We see it, we've been seeing a trend with, with H.D.

And Pound and now Williams to, to locate an otherwise harsh or, or, or dead, or

broken areas ... >> And language.

>> And language as well to, to, to locate the, the thing that, that shines or that

stands out or that's growing but I think Williams, in lines and in this poem

between the walls is sort of flipping that, that equation a little bit.

And he's not. He's not equating he's not equating the

sort of, the inorganic to the organic, but rather he's finding in the inorganic

something that's also inorganic but that is, is somehow more beautiful or attests

to some kind of beauty that exists. >> I think that's why the word shine is so

important in this, because the glass realistically reflects light, but shine

implies that it radiates the light from itself.

>> Let's talk about how these ideas get, get implemented in the form of the poem.

These are couplets, but barely. You get two or three words in one line,

followed by two or one word in the next line.

And then a stanza break. Does this help?

What does this, what does this augment? Kristen?

I'm sorry. Kristen and then Anna.

>> The broken pieces of the bottle. >> The poem is broken.

The poem is made of fragments. >> Mm-hm.

And so is the bottle. >> Anna?

>> Yeah, I agree. I, I think that the, the fragmentary

nature of the, the stanzas, first they make you read the poem very slowly which

kind of. >> They challenge.

The kind of natural flow of our reading. And I think if there's anything that

everything in this course you know, every piece has in common with each other, it is

the, the prospect of reading differently, of being forced to re-think the way

language, the way a word means. To think about your reading strategies is

having been naturalized and socialized so that you even try something new.

We think of modernism giving way to post-modernism as a break.

This certainly true not texture and may be in music.

But in poetry, I attend to argue, and so to many of my colleagues in the field that

the trend, that the continuity is between modernism and post-modernism are

significant. There are going to be many ways in which

it's different. One way in which it's different is that

the fantasy of objectivity, of precision, of concision, and of newness, especially

of newness, was just that, a fantasy. Post modern poets are not going to pretend

that they're creating something new. In fact, they like to recycle things.

They like to admit that everything is a quotation of everything else.

But a continuity is the, the disruption, the attempt to disrupt natural

symbolization, socialized valuation make you rethink the way everything gets read.

>> And that's certainly what's, what's going on here.

I am going to invite a final word or two on this poem.

Amaris I, I, I heard a rumor that your not a huge Williams fan.

>> [laugh] >> But, so I want you to react not to your general feelings about

Williams, but to this poem. >> Mm-hm.

>> Okay, well. >> To clear my desk.

>> I also think it was a brief misinterpretation of what I was saying,

but I [crosstalk]. >> So, rumors are not to be trusted.

>> No yes. I like, I was thinking metapoetically

about it again, and I was thinking that if you add in, you could actually read it as

one fluid line, in the back wings of the hospital where nothing will not grow, lies

cinders in which [crosstalk]. >> It is a sentence.

>> But the way that William Carlos William has created the line breaks allows the

separate words to shine. By placing emphasis on them, so.

>> So wow, dead language, these dead metaphor such as roses get to shine when

we make them new. And one of the ways we make them new is

like putting them on a page like a painter puts pigment on a canvas.

I think that should stand as the last word.

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