Hi, there. Welcome to week 8 of ModPo on the language poets. Weeks 8, 9, and 10 are meant to go together. They all form Chapter 9, so called. 9.1 is week 8, 9.2 is week 9, and 9.3 is week 10. In week 8, Chapter 9.1, we talked about the language poets, as I've mentioned. We're going to talk about that for a few minutes here by way of introduction to the week. In week 9, we look at chance-based and/or Aleatory poetry. You'll find that weeks 8, 9, and 10 relate to each other. They're all about roughly contemporary poetry and they're all happening simultaneously. Week 10 happening a little later chronologically, but the three go together as a way of providing an introduction to certain kinds of contemporary experimental poetry. Week 8, as I said, language poetry. Week 9, chance-based or aleatory poetry. Week 10, conceptual poetry, both narrowly and widely defined conceptual poetry, and other recent and contemporary poetry of reuse, quotation, redeployment, unoriginality, sound repetition, [inaudible] the poetry of determinant. That's week 10. There are two ways to think about language poetry. One, in a literary historical and theoretical sense, it refers to several clusters of poets of a certain generation, not specifically, but we would say a 60s and post-60s generation, people who came of age in the 50s and 60s, who were pretty much typically radicalized by the experience of the 60s and develop the kind of poetry we're talking about in the 70s and 80s, and of course, continue to work through the 90s and beyond. A certain generation in certain poetry communities, particularly San Francisco and New York, but also Washington DC, then Buffalo later in the late 80 and 90s, and then much later, Philadelphia. That's one narrow way and maybe ultimately less interesting way of talking about the language poets. I shouldn't say less interesting, but it is immoral literary historical sense. A wider and perhaps more productive way to think about the language poets is to think about those who, including the first-generation, self-identified language poets, and others later, and now who have been influenced by the ideas and theories or theoretical approach, the whole interest in theory. Poets interested in theory, that's a long tradition in US and other avant-gardes in the poetic world. But now, the language poets took it very seriously. They said it thumbs down to the fuzzy headed poet who was not really a reader of criticism and theory, and aesthetic theory in particular, but who just wrote the poems from the heart, and stood out in a field, and felt the romantic urge to express. The language poets generally mock that kind of natural poet, which is why it puts them at least superficially at odds with some of the ideas, for instance, some of the beat poets and some of the ideas of the so-called improvisational poets. But anyway, get ahead of myself. Two ways of thinking about language poetry. One, those clusters of colleagues, friends for the most part of a certain generation in certain poetry communities. Second, those who later and now have been influenced by the theories and ideas of the first self-identified language poets. I'll ask you to look for another very short, much too short video, in which I tried to summarize some of the ideas and theories of the first self-identified language poets. This week, we meet Lyn Hejinian, a few excerpts from My Life, her non-chronological, non-narrative, disjunctive, para-tactic autobiography, My Life. Then Bob Perelman, Chronic Meanings. Charles Bernstein, In a Restless World Like This is. Then Susan Howe, excerpts from her book, My Emily Dickinson. I would say, in the narrowest sense or in the most obvious sense, those four represent in the main syllabus, the first-generation or the specifically self-identified language poets. In a moment, I'll tell you about ModPo plus where we're going to meet some other terrific poets who could easily be in the main syllabus but aren't for lack of room. Then Harryette Mullen, two poems from a book called Sleeping with the Dictionary. Then Tyrone Williams, two poems, one is called Cant, C-A-N -T, not C-A-N apostrophe T, although there's a pun there, and Written by Himself. Then finally, John Keene, a parallel text prose poem experiment called Persons and Places. I want to tell you about ModPo plus, and then I want to return to some of the poems I just listed to tell you a little bit about them. Then I'm going to once again encourage you to watch the next short video. It's optional, totally optional. You do not need to hear me go on about some of the ideas of the language poets, but it'll be there available to you. ModPo plus in week 8 is just a plethora of exciting language or language identified or language affiliated that is language movement affiliated poets. Rae Armantrout, whom we met back in week 2 is very much a first-generation language poet, San Francisco area poet, later LA, San Diego, much identified with the group that I just mentioned. Ron Silliman, absolutely. Modpo people will be familiar with Ron Silliman along with My Life. Some of his early work does exactly what I just described, My life is having done. Robert Grenier, who's older than the first-generation language poets, but really a inspiration and an ally. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, absolutely devastatingly fabulous poet, who I'm glad to say is in ModPo plus. Larry Eigner, who moved to San Francisco from Boston in the middle of the whole scene and got involved with those colleagues. Lydia Davis, who's of course a writer of short stories and microfictions, but some of her strategies and some of her stories do exactly what we're talking about in week 8. Bruce Andrews, Fred Wah. Oh boy, the ModPo plus is just chock full. Let me comment just for a minute or two on some of the pieces. I already commented on My Life as a disjunctive out of order, new sentence arranged, new sentence constructed, autobiography. It's really exciting to encounter an autobiography that doesn't go in order. It goes in order year by year, but not within the year. Bob Perelman's Chronic Meanings picks up a couple of really important sub themes of the course. One of which of course is the experimental elegy. It is in fact a pre-elegy of a colleague and friend Lee Hickman an editor of Temblor, a Los Angeles based supporter and poet of a language group who got a diagnosis of HIV positive, and Chronic Meaning is a pre-elegy, really a poem written in honor. You'll see when you get to that poem, how Perelman uses the idea of experimental writing to say something about the cutting off of life during the AIDS crisis. Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson, I'm really glad that that's here. Susan Howe is trying to give us a sense in a long book-length close reading of a single poem by Emily Dickinson and a lot more. Trying to give us a sense of what it's like when a language poet looks back at Dickinson, and finds in Dickinson all the things in that protomodernist that we encounter later in the course and particularly in weeks 8, 9 and 10. So it's an updating of Dickinson. It's perfect for the course. I'm so glad that Susan Howe gives us a chance to circle back to Dickinson, to back to week 1 of this course. Sleeping with the Dictionary is a fabulous book, and the two poems, the work that we picked from it is not sufficient to give you a full sense of the book, so I urge everybody to go immediately to your online or in-person bookstore and get a copy of Sleeping with the Dictionary. The book really does what the title suggests. What would happened if you decided to take the dictionary as your lover? Tyrone Williams, Cant and Written By H'Self, two poems that textually, word by word and phrasily do what the language poets do, in my opinion at their best, which is to torque idioms, to take them, to twist them, to recalibrate them so that meaning exfoliate. It produces multiple readings just as it goes along. Tyrone Williams looks back using the tools of the language poets and of course, of many other experimental traditions in 20th century American poetry, to try to look at racial injustice and racism and anti-blackness and the history of that in the US while doing the work at the same time of an experimental poet in the contemporary scene. In doing so really extends the language poetry to where it ought to go. John Keene, who has provided as essay parallel text prose poem. So you have parallel columns in which W.E.B. Du Bois and George Santayana circle around each other in Harvard Yard at Harvard University in late 19th century, but don't connect. It's a perfect way to end the chapter that begins with My Life in a way because what you have is these two lives that are moving along and should connect, but don't connect and the poet has figured out how to give us both views, not just one, which is of course the traditional way is to pick a POV and stick with it. So that's week 8. Very exciting. An introduction really to the emerging contemporary scene as it was understood in the '80s and '90s in particular. We hope you enjoy it, and I hope you'll find some time, it will be tough, I realize if this is your first time, through ModPo to look at ModPo plus and to encounter some of those other poets as well.
