Description
ModPo is a FREE (no fee, no charge) 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!
ModPo is open all year, so you can enroll now, or any time, and join us. Each year we host a lively, interactive 10-week session, in which we move together through the ten-week syllabus. The next live 10-week session of ModPo will begin on September 3, 2022, and will conclude on November 14, 2022. Al Filreis will be in touch with you by email before the September 3 start of the course with all the information you’ll need to participate. If you have questions, you can email the ModPo team any time at [email protected]. Much more information about ModPo can be found at modpo.org.
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.
Much more information about ModPo can be found at modpo.org .
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.
What you will learn
chapter 1.1 (week 1)—Whitman & Dickinson, two proto-modernists
Week 1 of ModPo 2022 runs from Sunday, September 4 at 9 AM through Sunday, September 11 at 9 AM. For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 1 materials are open and available all year. In this first week of our course, we’ll encounter two 19th-century American poets whose quite different approaches to verse similarly challenged the official verse culture of the time. As a matter of form (but also of content), Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were radicals. What sort of radicalism is this? In a way, this course is all about exploring expressions of that radicalism from Whitman and Dickinson to the present day. Such challenges to official verse culture (and often U.S. culture at large) present us with a lineage of ideas about art and expression, a tradition that can be outlined, mostly followed, somewhat traced. In this course, we follow, to the best of our ability — and given the limits of time — that tradition and try to make overall sense of it. We will read Divya Victor’s “W Is for Walt Whitman’s Soul” toward the end of week 1 in anticipation of other later responses to Whitman and Dickinson encountered in week 2. You will find that we do this one poem at a time. Here in week 1, we will explore Dickinson first, Whitman second, and then begin to sketch out the major differences between them, which, some say, amount to two opposite ends of the spectrum of poetic experimentalism and dissent in the nineteenth century. Which is to say: on the spectrum of traditional-to-experimental poetry, these two poets are on the same end (experimental); on the spectrum of experimentalism, their approaches can put them on opposite ends. In short, they offer us alternative poetic radicalisms, and their influences down the line (which we will explore in week 2) are both powerful but are also largely distinct. One question you’ll be prepared to ask by the end of the course: Is the Dickinsonian or the Whitmanian tradition more ascendant and apt in today’s experimental poetry? ASSIGNMENTS: During this week, there are two quizzes due (see below); there are no writing assignments or peer reviews due. There is a live webcast on Wednesday, September 7, 2022, at 3PM (Philadelphia time).
chapter 1.2 (week 2)—Whitmanians & Dickinsonians
Week 2 of ModPo 2022 runs from Sunday, September 11 at 9 AM through Sunday, September 18 at 9 AM. For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 2 materials are open and available all year.During this week, the second half of chapter 1, we will read the work of two poets writing in the Whitmanian mode and three poets writing in the Dickinsonian mode. We will encounter our “Whitmanians,” William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, again later in the course—Williams as a modernist and Ginsberg as a Beat poet. The Whitman/Williams/Ginsberg connection is a strong one; Ginsberg wrote directly in response to both Whitman and Williams and saw the lineage as crucial to the development of his approach. Our “Dickinsonians” are more disparate in their response to Dickinson’s writing. Of the three—Lorine Niedecker, Cid Corman, and Rae Armantrout—only the last could be said to be a direct poetic descendant of Emily Dickinson’s aesthetic. ASSIGNMENTS: During this week, there are two quizzes due and a writing assignment. Writing assignment #1 is open for submission between 9 AM on 9/11/22 and 9 AM on 9/18/22; after that, peer reviews will be submitted any time between 9 AM on 9/18/22 and 9 AM on 9/25/22. There is also a live webcast on Wednesday, September 14, at 9:30 AM (Philadelphia time).
chapter 2.1 (week 3)—the rise of poetic modernism: imagism
Week 3 of ModPo 2022 runs from Sunday, September 18 at 9 AM through Sunday, September 25 at 9 AM. For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 3 materials are open and available all year.Modernism in poetry had many beginnings; imagism marks just one. But in a quick introduction, this brief but influential movement gives us a good place to start. Imagists disliked late Victorian wordiness, flowery figuration, and “beautiful” abstraction. They rejected such qualities through staunch assertions demanding concision, concentration, precise visuality, and a super-focused emotive objectivity. In this first of four sections of ModPo’s chapter 2, we will ask ourselves whether each poem meets the impossible or nearly impossible standards set out by imagist manifestos. If any given poem “fails” to meet such standards, it is by no means a sign of bad poetry. Still, one way to learn about the rise of poetic modernism is to make discernments based on the poets’ own (momentary) programmatic demands. At the end of this glimpse at modern poets’ radical condensations, we look ahead at the use of haiku by a contemporary poet, Tonya Foster.ASSIGNMENTS: During this week there are two quizzes due (see below). This is also the week in which peer reviews of writing assignment #1 are due. Peer reviews should be submitted any time between 9 AM on 9/25/22 and 9 AM on 10/2/22. There is also a live webcast on Wednesday, September 21 at 11 AM (Philadelphia time).
chapter 2.2 (week 3 cont.)—the rise of poetic modernism: Williams
Now in the second of four parts in 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.
chapter 2.3 (week 4)—the rise of poetic modernism: Stein
Week 4 of ModPo 2022 runs from Sunday, September 25 at 9 AM through Sunday, October 2 at 9 AM. For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 4 materials are open and available all year.Gertrude Stein’s contribution to modernist poetry and poetics cannot be overstated—and so now, in this third section of chapter 2, we turn to her, spending the better part of week 4 of our course on a selection of her supposedly “difficult” writings. The difficulty of deriving any sort of conventional semantic meaning from the short prose-poems that comprise Stein’s Tender Buttons turns out for many readers to be a helpful inducement to look for other kinds of signifying. As we hope you’ll see from the video discussions in this section, such difficulty need not excuse us from close reading. Stein’s poems really can be interpreted. They might reject representation, but by no means do they turn away from reference. The hard work you do in this part of chapter 2 will be amply rewarded when we get to chapter 9. Stein is a particular influence on John Ashbery in chapter 8, but she is a crucial influence on nearly every poet we’ll read in chapter 9. As a matter of fact, here in chapter 2 we have a chance to listen to Jackson Mac Low (a chapter 9 poet) talk about why he finds Stein’s opaque and difficult Tender Buttons so nonetheless meaningful. And we hear Joan Retallack (another chapter 9 poet) paying homage to Stein’s “Composition as Explanation.”ASSIGNMENTS: During this week there are two quizzes due (see below). There is also a writing assignment due. Writing assignment #2 should be submitted any time between 9 AM on 9/25/22 and 9 AM on 10/2/22; after that, peer reviews will be submitted any time between 9 AM on 10/2/22 and 9 AM on 10/9/22. There is also a live webcast on Wednesday, September 28, at Noon (Philadelphia time).
chapter 2.4 (week 4 cont.)—the rise of poetic modernism: modernist edges
“The Baroness” (Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven) was way out there. But because she so intensely embodied modernist experimentalism, our effort to learn something about her life and writing is an apt way, in part, to end our brief introduction to poetic modernism from roughly 1912 to 1929. The three instances of modernist extremity we will encounter in chapter 2.4 are very different expressions of “High Modernism.” Well, the Baroness was certainly high on highballs when she wrote the poem we’ll read—or rather, her language remarkably simulates a reeling discombobulation, such that its critique of 1920s-style commercialism (not in itself unusual at the time) has a very sharp edge. She was “New York Dada” epitomized, while Tristan Tzara’s ideas about cutting up newspapers to form “personal” poems were, among his many other radical notions, crucial to the Dadaist import. And John Peale Bishop, with whom we will end our two weeks of chapter 2? Well, as you’ll see, Bishop’s is another story altogether; his sonnet sets us up for our approach to doubts about modernist antics as expressed by the poets of chapters 3, 4 and 5.
