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

Thurs, Sept 16 - 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)
• Dickinson poems numbered #214, 632, 1129 (Norton)
• Dickinson #556
• poetic terms: meter | line | foot | iamb | couplet | ballad meter | assonance
  supplemental/optional readings:
• Dickinson online archive

Tues, Sept 21 - 7 PM - reading by Ron Silliman

Tues, Sept 21 & Thurs, Sept 23 - Walt Whitman and some Whitmanians

• headnote to Walt Whitman (Norton)
• Whitman, Song of Myself, cantos 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 47, 52 (Norton)
• 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
  supplemental/optional readings:
• Guillaume Appolinaire, "There Is"
• 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

Tues, Sept 28 - 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)
• 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"
• Lorine Niedecker, headnote (Norton)
• Lorine Niedecker, brief biographical profile
• Lorine Niedecker, "[A country's economics sick]"
• John Timpane's review of Niedecker's Collected Works (2003)
• Lorine Niedecker, "You are my friend," "Grandfather advised me"
• Niedecker, "I rose from marsh mud" [wedding poem]
• Niedecker, "Don't tell me property is sacred!"
• Niedecker, from "Switchboard Girl" (1951)
• H.D., "Red Rose and a Beggar"
• Ron Silliman on Dickinson
• Rae Armantrout, "About" (MP3)
• Rae Armantrout, "The Way"
• Rae Armantrout discusses "The Way" with Charles Bernstein and reads the poem
• Rae Armantrout, "About"
• Rae Armantrout, "Solid" (MP3; performed at the Writers House, October 2000)
• Rae Armantrout reading her own poems through the influence of Dickinson
• Ron Silliman on Dickinson--Niedecker--Armantrout
• Cid Corman, "It isnt for want"
• Cid Corman reading "It isn't for want" (MP3 file)
• Cid Corman, "Assistant"
• 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 several Niedecker poems; don't feel obliged to mention all of them in your analysis; but do refer at least to two of them.)
• paper option #2 Look again at Dickinson's "I taste a liquor never brewed" as edited and anthologized by Oscar Williams. Would you argue that what Williams does to Dickinson is (to some degree) to make her less Dickinsonian? Do you think Williams' editing tends to diminish some of the Dickinsonian qualities of the poem? If so, work with the two versions of the poem and describe who this operates? If you think the Dickinsonian quality of the poem is not diminished by what Williams does as editor, explain your position again with respect to the two versions of the poem.
  supplemental/optional readings:
• recording of a live webcast discussion on Whitman and Dickinson, held on October 3, 1999 ()
• Lorine Niedecker, part 9 of "For Paul" (1950)

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