Essay due in 60 hours? Prefer to volunteer as a tribute instead?

ELIT 48CClass 27

Shall we negotiate?

Carolyn Keen Literature Prize

• Awards: Money! 100-300 bucks!

• Winner published in the Red Wheelbarrow

• Deadline extended until Tuesday, May 28

• Requirement 3-10 pages

To Apply

1. Submit a one-page, typed cover letter stating academic and career goals. Please include your name, email address, home address, and home phone. Be sure to identify the course for which you wrote your essay.

2. Submit two copies of your essays to Amy Leonard’s mailbox in the Language Arts Division Office by Tuesday, May 28th

Poetry is “a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructedas a table or a motorcycle”-W. H. Auden

AGENDA

Postmodern ManifestosOlsonO’Hara Bishop Ammons Lorde

PostmodernismAuthor Introduction:

Ralph Ellison

Charles Olson1910-1979

Frank O'Hara(1926-1966)

Elizabeth Bishop1911 –1979

A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)

Audre Lorde1934- 1992

“(1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it” (409).

“(2) the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composition”

– “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” (410).

(3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished

– “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (410).

Charles OlsonCharles OlsonDo Olson’s three points apply only to a radically new form of postmodern poetry, or are these principles that apply to all poetry? Is “projective verse” a specific kind of poetry, or is it better characterized as a poetic sensibility?

Do Olson’s three points apply only to a radically new form of postmodern poetry, or are these principles that apply to all poetry? Is “projective verse” a specific kind of poetry, or is it better characterized as a poetic sensibility?

FRANK O’HARAFRANK O’HARA

• In “Personism,” O’Hara defines the poem as an intimate link connecting two people. – “I went back to work and wrote a poem for [a

person I was in love with]. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement . . . which puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person.”

• In “Personism,” O’Hara defines the poem as an intimate link connecting two people. – “I went back to work and wrote a poem for [a

person I was in love with]. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement . . . which puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person.”

ELIZABETH BISHOPELIZABETH BISHOP• “In general, I deplore the ‘confessional.’ ”

• “But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & father and sex lives and so on.”

• “I can’t bear to have anything you write tell—perhaps—what we’re really like in 1972—perhaps it’s as simple as that.”

• “In general, I deplore the ‘confessional.’ ”

• “But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & father and sex lives and so on.”

• “I can’t bear to have anything you write tell—perhaps—what we’re really like in 1972—perhaps it’s as simple as that.”

In “Personism,” O’Hara defines the poem as an intimate link connecting two people. In her letter to Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop rails against what she considers excessive intimacy in poetic expression. How can such different opinions toward the personal in poetry both be considered under the heading of “postmodern poetry”? Is one more postmodern than the other? Whether or not they agree with each other, are they both responding to a shared set of concerns about poetry? About life in the post–World War II era?

In “Personism,” O’Hara defines the poem as an intimate link connecting two people. In her letter to Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop rails against what she considers excessive intimacy in poetic expression. How can such different opinions toward the personal in poetry both be considered under the heading of “postmodern poetry”? Is one more postmodern than the other? Whether or not they agree with each other, are they both responding to a shared set of concerns about poetry? About life in the post–World War II era?

A. R. AMMONSA. R. AMMONS

• “How does a poem resemble a walk?”– “each makes use of the whole body”

– “every walk is unreproducible, as is every poem”

– “each turns, one or more times, and eventually returns”

– “the motion occurs only in the body of the walker or in the body of the words”

• “How does a poem resemble a walk?”– “each makes use of the whole body”

– “every walk is unreproducible, as is every poem”

– “each turns, one or more times, and eventually returns”

– “the motion occurs only in the body of the walker or in the body of the words”

Ammons contends that poetry and walking are alike in that “both the real and the fictive walk are externalizations of an inward seeking.”

Let’s talk about that in terms of this: “A poetry . . . centered in the body became more personal, inviting into the poem the particulars of a poet’s life.”

How do Ammons’s ideas about the physicality of poetry illuminate the debate between Bishop and O’Hara about using poetry to communicate private matters? Would Ammons agree with Bishop or O’Hara? Or is Ammons changing the terms of the debate entirely, shifting our attention to physical experience rather than personal experience?

AUDRE LORDEAUDRE LORDE

• “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

• “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to discipline (transpose) them into language that catches those feelings so that they can be shared.”

• “Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

• “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

• “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to discipline (transpose) them into language that catches those feelings so that they can be shared.”

• “Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

Lorde is making some big claims about the importance of poetry. Is she overstating her case? Is poetry as important as she claims it to be? If you don’t think that poetry per se is as important as Lorde insists, what if we read her manifesto to be a defense of language as a whole? Do we need language—and, in particular, the kind of precise, articulate, and beautiful language that we find in poetry—to make sense of our existence as human beings? What would life be like without language to give meaning to it?

Brief Lecture

Postmodernism

• What is postmodernism?– the experimental aesthetic movements of the

post–World War II era

– a multi-faceted engagement with modernist aesthetics and philosophy

• a rejection of modernism• a continuation of the “unfinished project” of

modernism• a self-critical reflection on modernism

From Modernism to Postmodernism

• Rejects 19th-century sociological realism and 20th-century psychological realism

• Considers history and fiction both as products of the imagination

• Questions whether literature can represent reality

• Focuses self-reflexively on language itself

Postmodern Fiction

In fiction “the issue under debate was realism. Whether grounded in sociological observation (as some later nineteenth-century writers would have it) or in psychology and myth (the favorite of some twentieth-century moderns), such representation had become, by 1960, an orientation harder and harder to defend . . . One response by subsequent writers would be to write what the critic Linda Hutcheon has called ‘historiographic metafiction,’ in which the novelist treats actual events and fantasized material on an equal basis, with an emphasis on how history and fiction are events created by the imagination . . . Other writers chose to question the very presumption of representational literary art . . . Literary journalism, as always influenced by its fictive cousin, now centered less on presumed objectivity than on the experience of the journalist encountering that object” (NAAL 400–401).

• A shift from the poem as artifact to the poem as open-ended process

• An increasing emphasis on the unconscious, accident, and chance

• A growing focus on the body, gender, and women’s experiences

• A greater sense of the poet’s personal life reflected in the poetry itself

Postmodern Poetry

“After several decades in which impersonality and objectivity were the key values in poetry criticism, poets shifted the focus from the poem as artifact . . . to the poem as open-ended process. The unconscious began to take up a larger place in poetry, and accident and chance became, at times, structuring principles . . . For some poets a focus on the body brought attention to issues of gender and the ways in which the particularity of a woman’s embodied experiences had been silenced in poetry . . . A poetry open to the unconscious and centered in the body became more personal, inviting into the poem the particulars of a poet’s life” (NAAL 400).

Author Introduction

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was named after the celebrated poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, by his father who wanted his son to become a poet. Today Ellison is mostly remembered as the mastermind who wrote the emotive and gripping novel “Invisible Man” (along with many others) which met with much critical success, winning the National Book Award in 1953. 

Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on 1st March 1914. He was born to Ida Millsap and Lewis Alfred Ellison and had a brother Herbert Millsap Ellison. In his initial years Ellison and his family had to deal with difficult times. In 1965, Ellison received the honor of his book “Invisible Man” being declared the most important novel since the end of WW11 by survey of 200 prominent literary figures.

HOMEWORK

Read Ralph Ellison, “The Prologue,” and “Battle Royal” from Invisible Man. 206-224

Post #27 Choose one: What does the reader know about the narrator solely on the basis of

the Prologue? Explain both what he reveals about himself explicitly and what inferences can be drawn, justifying your findings as you go along.

Why would the audience listening to the narrator’s speech have reacted so strongly to the narrator’s mistake? Discuss the implications of his slip of the tongue.

QHQ