Emily Dickinson Of Visitors--the fairest-- For Occupation--This

week 1b - Sept. 16-19 - Emily Dickinson

• Emily Dickinson, "I dwell in possibility"
• video: Al Filreis and Shawn Walker discuss "I dwell in possibility"
• biographical profile
• headnote to Dickinson (Norton, pp. 44-46)
• Dickinson poems numbered #214, 632, 1129 (Norton, pp. 47-53)
• Dickinson #566
• poetic terms: meter | line | foot | iamb | couplet | ballad meter | assonance

• webcast live from the Writers House: book launch and poetry reading by Shawn Walker from her book The Purchase of a Day, Saturday evening, Sept. 18, 7 PM. A full announcement about this event is here. Learn more about the handwritten press. When the day and time of the webcast arrive, click here to begin receiving the webcast signal. [Posted after the event: a recording of the webcast is now available here.] ()
  supplemental/optional readings:
• Dickinson online archive

week 2a, 2b - Sept. 20-26 - Walt Whitman and some Whitmanians

• headnote to Walt Whitman (Norton, pp. 19-22)
• Whitman, Song of Myself, cantos 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 47, 52 (Norton, pp. 22-35)
• Whitman, "The Sleepers"

  Walt Whitman, country bumpkin? --from Leaves of Grass

• Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric"
• poetic term: repetition
• Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"
• audio: Ginsberg reads "A Supermarket in California" (courtesy "The Listening Booth")
• video: Ginsberg reads "A Supermarket in California" (courtesy Best Minds/The Museum of American Poetics)
• Ginsberg, "America"
• Ginsberg performs "America"
• Ginsberg, "Sphincter"
• William Carlos Williams, "Danse Russe"
• video: Al Filreis and Shawn Walker discuss Williams's "Danse Russe"
• Williams, "Smell!"
• audio: Williams reading "Smell!"
• Williams, "Catholic Bells"
• audio: Williams reading "Catholic Bells"
• Whitman's working-class hero from Guthrie to Springsteen
• Guillaume Appolinaire, "There Is"
  supplemental/optional readings:
• Henry Miller, from Tropic of Cancer
• Whitman, "To a Pupil"
• Walt Whitman as remembered by the radical "Mother Bloor"
• Walt Whitman's style according to communist critic Samuel Sillen in 1955
• "The Poetry of Barbarism" by George Santayana, partly about Whitman

week 3a, 3b - Sept. 27-Oct. 3 - Dickinson (again) and some Dickinsonians

the sentence

"Oh yes, the sentence," Robert Creeley once told the critic Burton Hatlen, "that's what we call it when we put someone in jail."

• Emily Dickinson, poems numbered 303, 341 (Norton, p. 48-49)
• Dickinson, poems numbered 1695, 1705
• Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed" as edited and anthologized by Oscar Williams
• Oscar Williams, "The Last Supper" (from the anthology Immortal Poems of the English Language edited by Oscar Williams)
• poem numbered 1052
• version of #1052 as it appeared in a 1900 anthology of American poetry
• 1129 and 632
• Whitman according to Dickinson
• Elizabeth Bishop, "Filling Station"
• audio: Elizabeth Bishop reading "Filling Station" (courtesy of The Factory School Library of Recorded Sounds)
• Lorine Niedecker, brief biographical profile
• Lorine Niedecker, "You are my friend," "Grandfather advised me"
• Lorine Niedecker, "[A country's economics sick]"
• Niedecker, "I rose from marsh mud" [wedding poem]
• Niedecker, "Don't tell me property is sacred!"
• John Timpane's review of Niedecker's Collected Works (2003)
• Niedecker, from "Switchboard Girl" (1951)
• Magdalena Zurawski, from "Ten Imaginary Love Poems for Joan of Arc": "1: "Joan, Never Read or Write"
• H.D., "Red Rose and a Beggar"
• Ron Silliman on Dickinson
• Rae Armantrout, "Solid" (performed at the Writers House, October 2000)
• Rae Armantrout, "The Way"
• Rae Armantrout discusses "The Way" with Charles Bernstein and reads the poem
• Rae Armantrout, "About"
• Rae Armantrout reading her own poems through the influence of Dickinson
• Ron Silliamn on Dickinson--Niedecker--Armantrout
• Cid Corman, "It isnt for want"
• Cid Corman reading "It isn't for want" (MP3 file)
• Cid Corman, "Assistant"
• Cid Corman, ["follow the stream"]
• audio recording of a conversation with Cid Corman at the Kelly Writers House, November 19, 2001
• paper option #1 How is the Dickinsonian or "intensive" modern poetic practice, as found specifically in Dickinson's #303, 341, 1670, 1695, and 1705, furthered or supported by the poems by Lorine Niedecker on the reading list? In other words: what's so "Dickinsonian" about Niedecker? (We are reading four Niedecker poems; don't feel obliged to mention all four in your analysis; but do refer at least to two of them.)
• paper option #2 Is the Dickinsonian or "intensive" modern poetic practice, as found specifically in Dickinson's #303, 341, 1670, 1695, and 1705, endorsed or contradicted by Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station"? Not both endorsed and contradicted, but one or the other. Take an interpretive position! Give it a try!
• webcast discussion, with email interactivity, Sunday, October 3, live at 8 PM eastern time from the Kelly Writers House: discussion/debate on the Whitmanian mode "versus" the Dickinsonian mode. When the day and time of the webcast arrive, click here to begin receiving the webcast signal. ()
  supplemental/optional readings:
• audio recording of Lorine Niedecker reading from her poetry in November 1970
• new photograph discovered of the young Emily Dickinson
• Lorine Niedecker, part 9 of "For Paul" (1950)

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