1:00p-2:15p MW (30) 3 cr.
Sugar is not a vegetable.* In this course, we’ll be tracing four different modes of “making it new” that are intertwined throughout the 20th Century, and still relevant today at the beginning of the 21st Century: Popular Modernism, Formal Modernism, Academic Modernism and Radical Modernism. All along the tendency to deplore the absence of more has not been authorized.* Early on in the semester, we’ll focus on particular poems by some of the early Modernists— Frost, Eliot, Williams, Stein, etc. A lamp is not the only sign of glass.* Midway through we’ll read four books by important mid-century poets. A sudden slice changes the whole plate, it does so suddenly.* And towards the end of the semester we’ll read four recent poets, and ask them to talk about their relationship to the poets we’ve been studying. A sign is the specimen spoken.*
Written work will consist of two papers, a test and a creative
project. A cup is neglected
by being all in size.* And therefore books for the course will
include a cheap anthology,
The Voice That Is Great Within Us, ed. Hayden Carruth, The
Complete Poems by
Elizabeth Bishop, Ariel by Sylvia Plath, Life Studies/For
the Union Dead by
Robert Lowell, Collected Poems by Robert Hayden, The Falling
Hour by David
Wojahn, In Search of the Great Dead by Richard Cecil, Rock
Farm by Catherine
Bowman and Soul Train by Allison Joseph. Special thanks to
Gertrude Stein for
starred sentences. It is a winning cake.*