Graduate Courses - ENG 649: Seminar in Modern and Postmodern American Poetry
Prerequisite: Graduate Standing or permission
Recent offerings:
Realism and Avant-Garde American Poetries, 1920-present (Spring 2009, Billitteri)
This seminar explores the transformation of Walt Whitman’s realist poetics in the work of the modern and post-modern American avant-gardes. Our focus will not be poetic influence but intellectual history; our efforts will be directed at a charting of the several transformations of a poetic project through time.
Whitman’s search for a poetry of the real—a poetry capable of recreating and faithfully transmitting the concrete reality of contemporary life—resonates with particular force in much of the most important American poetry of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. The realist research of the avant-gardes is not always perfectly aligned with all aspects of Whitman’s poetics. Indeed, as we will see, in the majority of cases poets operate on linguistic and philosophical premises that are at odds with Whitman’s own philosophical and linguistic beliefs. Nevertheless, the avant-gardes share with Whitman a foundational desire for a poetry that is socially, politically and ethically meaningful only insofar as it can legitimately claim (and demonstrate) to be vast enough and capacious enough as to encompass the epistemic multiplicity of the real in all its discordant manifestations.
We will read the poetry and the writings of Whitman, together with selected representative figures of the modern and post-modern American avant-garde: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Charles Olson, Lorine Niedecker, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Claudia Rankine, Nada Gordon, and Gary Sullivan. We will also consider such movements as imagism, objectivism, projectivism, language poetry, and flarf.