"The world, the universe, is a system of correspondences under the rule of rhythm. Everything connects, everything rhymes. Every form in nature has something to say to every other. The poet is not a maker of rhythm but its transmitter. Analogy is the highest expression of the imagination."
-Octavio Paz

There is hardly a more exciting framework for the study of poetry than the United States of the 20th Century. A study of 20th Century American poetry would have to ask: What is American? What is poetry? What happened in the 20th Century and before and beyond? We will consider this country's history of mixing the so-called high and low arts, its institutional disinterest in poetry, as well as its poly-lingualism and various Englishes that result in a poetry of expansive lexicons, grammars, experiments, traditions, intentions, and retentions.

Central to the concerns of this class is the American avant-garde. We will read poetry that is concerned with language itself, with culture, with resisting neat categories and easy "interpretations." Some call it "counter-poetics" or "experimental" or "difficult." We'll investigate and through this work, develop a reading muscle that is open and receptive, comfortable with taking a long look or a read-through several times, and a muscle that is ready to feel as well as to think.

The goal of the course is to develop ways of understanding poetry and to enable you to read any kind of poetry. Because the dichotomy of reader/writer or worse yet, writer/critic is a dichotomy created and reinforced by literary and academic marketplace interests, we will, this summer, also experience writing poetry together. This is not Poetry Workshop but we will experiment with various writing activities so as to become different kinds of readers.

Course Schedule

(The weeks are organized, to some extent, chronologically. We're moving through the 20th century. But it is not always organized so; poets "talk" to each other through the years and are influenced and inspired by each other's work even when they are not contemporaries of each other. You can see the similarities in some poets work even if they are fifty years apart. Also, because of the need to name and organize and lay out a schedule, it appears as if lots of poets belonged to "schools" of poetry that have names. The reality is that the naming of "schools" is more of the work of academics than poets in most cases. Poets move in and out of group affiliations; poets change their intentions and write new statements on poetics all the time. Be aware of this; know the terms but know their function which is most often to create definitions and make the expansive study of poetry more manageable.)

Week One: What is poetry? What happened during the 20th Century? What is American? : Dickinson and Whitman and The Blues

Week Two
Migrations : Gertrude Stein and Langston Hughes, Victor Hernandez Cruz and Edwin Torres

Week Three
Expansive Poems : T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joy Harjo

Week Four
William Carlos Williams/George Oppen : The Other Post-war American Poetry: Olson/Duncan/Creeley : Close reading of a poem is due

Week Five
Sampling : Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge

Week Six
The Beats : Black Arts Movement : The New York School

Week Six
Words/Drawing/Writing : Instan by Cecilia Vicuña

Week Seven
Reading/Celebration/Final Papers are due

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