Schedule
| Section 01 | Poetics of Fact / Poetics of Figures | due |
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Introduction: What is documentary? What are poems? & what, above all, is a documentary poem? Hughes, "Johannesburg Mines" |
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| Jan. 21 | Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (MAPS 656-81) & the documentary fact: background for Hawk's Nest Incident post: Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead" (1938) emerged from a trip she took with a friend who was a documentary filmmaker. In this post, compare the opening of the poem to the opening of a documentary film: how do "The Road," "West Virginia," and "Gauley Bridge" set the scene and themes for the first part of this poem? What details stay with you as you move forward into the poem? |
post on ICON |
Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (MAPS 656-81) focused pair: soundfiles: Assignment: 1) reread Book of the Dead, moving back and forth between the parts and the whole; 2) read the critics in MAPS on your section; 3) prepare to open class discussion of that section with a question that arises from the section, its relation to the whole, and/or the critical comments on it. |
discussion start |
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| Jan. 28 | Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead (MAPS 656-81) & the "unverifiable" fact Pare Lorentz, The River post: As in many modernist long poems, there are two layers in Rukeyser's poem: history and myth or, as we've been describing them, fact and figure. In this post, look either 1) at the presence of what Cary Nelson calls "the consolatory myth system of the Egyptian Book of the Dead" or 2) at the mythology that underlies Pare Lorentz's film The River. How does Rukeyser integrate mythology into her documentary? What difference does it make? In particular, in your reading, does the mythological layer blunt or sharpen the historical critique in the first part of the poem? |
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Mark Nowak, poems from Shut Up Shut Down Nowak interview (pdf on ICON) post: Like Rukeyser's Book of the Dead, Nowak's "$00/Line/Steel/Train" is a documentary poem that builds from names, dates, places, and ordinary worker's talk. Read the poem carefully with an eye toward Nowak's framing of his material, then write a couple of paragraphs introducing us to your section of this poem. |
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| Feb. 4 | Nowak synopsis of Brecht's The Mother post: For this post on "June 19, 1982," Megan will focus on the background, Tim on the economic terminology, Jarryd on the relationship between the photos and the text (using one section as an example), and Jia and Micah will look closely at a section of their choosing. |
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Nowak browse LTV Steel website excerpts from Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes, and Wang Bin's West of the Tracks post: "Where," Nowak asks in his "Notes on Anti-Capitalist Poetics," "are the poems bridging and building transnational social and aesthetic networks of alternative and agitational modes of grammar and syntax, revolutionary poetic critiques of corporate culture (the contemporary complement to Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead)?” In this post, respond with reference to "Hoyt Lakes / Shut Down." In what ways does this sequence enter into conversation with Rukeyser's anti-capitalist project in Book of the Dead? _______________________________ ANNOTATIONS:SIGN UP ON WIKI HOMEPAGE . . . or another selection on Rukeyser or Nowak from our reserve materials in the Main Library |
post select an essay to annotate & sign up on Wiki homepage |
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| Feb. 11 | annotations due on Wiki |
annotations / Wiki |
| Section 02 | American Traditions: Three Poetics of Fact |
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Paper conferences / February 15, 16, or 17: sign-up on Wiki Imagism & the Radiant Fact Arnold, Dover Beach Pound, "In a Station of the Metro" (MAPS 204) Images from Blast (1914-15) post: "What are the Imagists tired of?" asked Sir Herbert Read. "They are tired," he answered, "of 'Dover Beach." But why? After reading Matthew Arnold's poem, Pound's prose explanation of Imagism, and the Imagist poems by Pound, H.D., and Williams, explore how "Dover Beach" violates Imagist rules. How do these Imagists avoid what they perceive to be Arnold's flaws? |
conferences
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| Feb.18 | no class Feb. 18th: work on papers |
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Objectivism & the Sincere Fact Louis Zukofsky George Oppen: Oppen reading Psalm |
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| Feb. 25 | Oppen, Discrete Series post: Each of you has signed up for a short block of poems from Oppen's Discrete Series. In this post, select one of those poems and offer a set of questions and the beginnings of an analysis to guide our discussion of that poem. In this post, treat the poem as a perceptual field rather than a plot: what are the items in that field? In what ways are those items related? How does the poem direct our attention across them? "Writing," Oppen says, "is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody." How does your poem think with (rather than about) "things as they exist"? |
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Oppen, Discrete Series (pdf on ICON) post: The purpose of this post is to begin working with the interpretive challenges generated in the juxtaposition of visual and textual documents. After re-reading Oppen's poem beginning "Civil war photo" (21) and browsing through Berenice Abbott's photographic series, pair one of the poems from Discrete Series with one of the photographs from Abbott's New York in the Thirties. Oppen's series, written in New York, was originally titled "The 1930s": these parallel titles suggest that they were working to capture the same historical place/time. In your analysis, compare the experience of reading the Oppen poem to the experience of looking at the Abbott photograph. How does the juxtaposition affect your reading of both the image and the text? |
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| March 4 | Oppen, Discrete Series Oppen, "In Alsace" (MAPS 605) Charles Reznikoff, Testimony (MAPS 355-64) post: A fundamental paradox of a "discrete series" is that each item is encountered in itself--not derived from a preceding term but disclosed "in itself"--yet each item is also part of a temporal sequence, thus not wholly "in itself." In this post, look back from your poem--one of the last five in the series--toward the poems that precede it. How does this poem comment on yet retain independence from the others? |
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About the Holocaust Reznikoff, Holocaust (MAPS 364-370) post: The reading for this class contains three kinds of materials--documentary reportage by Edward R. Murrow, the first reporter to enter the Nazi death-camps; Reznikoff's documentary poems made from survivor testimonies at Nuremberg and the Eichmann Trial; and Rukeyser's lyric sonnet on being a Jew in the century of the Holocaust. How does Reznikoff's poetry differ from news reporting, on the one hand, and lyric poetry on the other? Using one of his poems, define the odd category of the "documentary poem." |
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| March 11 | Socialist Realism & the Activist Fact Mike Gold, Toward a Proletarian Art Beecher, "Report to Stockholders" & "Beaufort Tides" (MAPS 557-60) Worker's Correspondence poems: post: In a letter, Oppen wrote, "I did not write 'Marxist' poetry. I made a choice. Stopped, for the crisis, writing" (SL 277). This choice contrasts with the poets above, who committed their art to their politics. What strategies make for an effective socialist realist poem? How do these poets turn "fact" to the work of politics? Which succeed? Which don't? |
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| Section 03 | Image/Text Documentaries | |
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Caldwell & Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) post: Taking the principles we began to develop in our discussion of Abbott and Oppen, discuss the relationship between photos and text in these two image/text compilations. Choose one photo from each and discuss the way in which the text simplifies or complicates the photograph and/or vice versa. In your assessment, think about the ethics of these two projects. If you want to be polemical here--i.e., set up the comparison as successful vs. failed--don't hesitate; if you'd like to resist such a dichtomy, don't hesitate. |
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| March 25 | Agee & Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Part 1 (43-98) and Part II: Shelter (107-93) post: Agee carefully positions his text as a record or document by framing it within three points of reference: two epigraphs--one from King Lear, the other from Marx--and a biblical title (see Title Statement, p. 391). Using these three reference points, write two paragraphs defining what it is this text records or documents. Feel free to compare it, should it be useful to do so, to Caldwell and Bourke-White's documentation in You Have Seen Their Faces. |
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Agee & Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men through Intermission (316) post: In this post, focus on Agee's section entitled "Work." If Caldwell's focus was the economic system of sharecropping, what elements center Agee and Evans's analysis of sharecropping labor? What aspects do they emphasize? What aspects do they omit? How do Evans's photographs complement or contest Agee's text? |
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| April 1 | Agee & Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men through the end Wiki: sign-up for bibliographic annotation of essay or chapter on Let Us Now Praise |
Wiki sign-up |
Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, Pts. 1 & 2 post: Richard Wright's collaboration with Edwin Rosskam, who chose the photos from the FSA archives, loosens the relation between the text and photos as far as the compositional process is concerned. Does it change your reception of the relations between these two elements of the compilation? Compare the relationship between text and photo here with their relationship in the previous two compilations we've read. Selecting at least one specific pairing, discuss this book in relation to You Have Seen Their Faces and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. |
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| April 8 | Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, Pts. 3 & 4 post: The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution speaks for and from a first-person plural, a "we, the People" that justifies the rights the Constitution guarantees. Wright also speaks from a "we," but this first-person plural is explicitly raced, ambiguously classed, and variously located in the South and in the North. In this post, work with the pronouns that locate the "voices" in Wright's text. Who is this "we"--trace some its variations--but who also is "you" and "they"? In exploring these pronouns, work as well with the photos that accompany them. How does Wright construct the "voices" of this text? |
post Agee/Evans Wiki entry due |
Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely post: Like the other documentaries we've read, Rankine's booklength poem is, among other things, a meditation on events reported in the news, supported by footnotes and paired with photographs. The poem's subtitle, however, is "An American Lyric." What is a lyric? What's this poem's relation to the lyric? In what way is it "an American lyric"? |
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| April 15 | Rankine The Pattern, by Robert Creeley post: From "We the People" to "Let Us Praise," documentary texts worry over the first-person plural, trying to achieve, straining to build, a more capacious speaking position than the lyric "I." "Is 'I' even me or am 'I' a gearshift to get from one sentence to the next?," the speaker asks in Don't Let Me Be Lonely. "Should I say we?" (54). "I, or we," she adds some pages later, "it hardly matters" (67). Selecting one of the closing sections of Don't Let Me Be Lonely as your focus, explore the ways in which Rankine's text disturbs the distinction between "we" and "I." |
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| Section 04 | Poetics of Catastrophe: Fact, Documentary, and the Aftermath of 9/11 | |
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Brenda Coultas, "The Bowery Project," A Handmade Museum (11-51) Prevallet, Writing Is Never By Itself Alone: Six Mini-Essays on Relational Investigative Poetics browse The Factory School website, especially the mission statement & Heretical Texts series |
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| April 22 | explore 9/11 digital archive Prevallet, "Pop-Prop-Agit" (35-46) & sound file Juliana Spahr post: The collapse of the twin towers, Juliana Spahr writes, "changed the way [she and her fellow poets] read poetry, the way they looked at art, the way they thought about ideas" (T 187). Their experience was a twist of urgency and bafflement: a need to write, an uncertainty about how to write. In this post, describe the ways in which one of these poems--Prevallet's "Pop-Prop-Agit" or Spahr's "Poem Written after September 11, 2001"--use poetry to think catastrophe. What can poetry do to document and respond to disaster? |
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Spahr paper comments on Wiki [click on Add Comment after the paper]: |
response to Paper 2
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| April 29 | 9/11 poems Lehman, Perelman, Bernstein, Walker: a packet of 9/11 poems (pdf available on ICON) post: Juliana Spahr's definition of "Poetry in a Time of Crisis" is close to the measure we've been using this semester for documentary poetics. Selecting one of the poems in this packet of 9/11 poems, work with the ways in which it moves us not inward but "outward to the public and collective." What makes an effective poetic response to crisis? How does the poem you have selected succeed or fail as a poem composed in response to crisis? |
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Watten, selections from Bad History Philip Johnson office building at 580 California Street, photos, & blog response post: Watten begins a short essay entitled "War=Language" with these lines from Allen Ginsberg's Vietnam-era "Wichita Vortex Sutra": "The war is language, / language abused / for Advertisement, / language used / like magic for power on the planet." We might think of Bad History as an attempt to address the abuse of language that eased America's entry into the first Iraq War. If war-talk is, in Watten's words, "a barrage of language that is meant to destroy our capacity to interpret what is said, to make rational judgments, to evaluate moral choices, to visualize what is going on, the think the unthinkable, to remember, to imagine an alternative future, to connect to others, to use language for all its purposes, to convey content, to express emotion, to reveal its own signification, to make noise," what can documentary poetry do to (en)counter that barrage? Discuss with reference to one section of Bad History. |
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| May 6 | Watten, Bad History Prevallet, Shadow Evidence Intelligence Prospectus for your own Shadow Project: post on Wiki and bring hard copy |
paragraph prospectus for Shadow Project
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May 13 |
presentation of Shadow Project 2:15 pm |
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Updated May 4, 2010 10:50 • Contact Dee Morris