Chapter 9: Language Poetry, the legacy of "new poetries," and the contemporary avant garde

Chapter 9: Language Poetry, the legacy of "new poetries," and the contemporary avant garde

week 11a, 11b - Nov. 29-Dec. 5 - introduction to the "language poetry" movement

Ron Silliman

audio: Al Filreis and Shawn Walker on aspects of "language poetry" and contemporary avant-garde writing
Jerome McGann, "Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes" - an essay introducing the "language writing" movement
Lyn Hejinian on the concept of the personal
Alan Davies, from "Life" (published in hole #3)
George Hartley, "Textual Politics and the Language Poets"
Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (peruse several issues)
Susan Howe, "My Emily Dickinson"
Lee Ann Brown, "Multiplicity Sisters"
ideas for poetry experiments compiled by Charles Bernstein from Bernadette Mayer & workshop's Experiments list, and various other sources
Charles Bernstein, "Nuclear Blanks"
Charles Bernstein, "In Particular" (performed at the Writers House, September 25, 2003)
Charles Bernstein, "Thinking I Think I Think"
Charles Bernstein, biography
Charles Bernstein, "I Don't Take Voice Mail" (essay)
Charles Bernstein, "Veil" - visual writing
Charles Bernstein, "These Horses Do Not Move Up and Down"
Charles Bernstein commentary on All Things Considered about National Poetry Month

Mike Magee edits Combo, with support from the Kelly Writers House: Combo is a magazine featuring emerging experimental writers
Ron Silliman bibliography
Ron Silliman, "Demo" (1995)
audio: on the dismissal of "voice" and the rejection of ego psychology in Language poetics" (the opening paragraph of Marjorie Perloff's essay, "Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject," read by Shawn Walker)
video: Al Filreis on Lyn Hejinian's My Life and language poets's resistance to the narrative of personhood
Lyn Hejinian, a sample section from My Life
Stanley Fish, "Just Published: Minutiae Without Meaning," a critique of biography and biographical narrative (1999)
a biographical note on Lyn Hejinian
Ron Silliman, "Albany", audio file
Marjorie Perloff on Silliman's "Albany"
Ron Silliman, "Oz" (from the long poem The Alphabet) - audio file
Tina Darragh, "ludicrous stick" from the Paris Review "Language Sampler"
Robert Grenier, "But" (1986)
Bob Perelman, on modernism as an ongoing project
audio: Bob Perelman on why Williams' "unsuccessful" poems are relevant to contemporary poetics (mp3)
Bob Perelman, "Chronic Meanings"
Bob Perelman reads "Chronic Meanings" (January 29, 2004)
Bob Perelman, commentary on "Chronic Meanings"
Bob Perelman talks about "Chronic Meanings"
Perelman, more on "Chronic Meanings"
Bob Perelman, "Fake Dream B" as it appeared in the Electronic Poetry Review
Bob Perelman, "Clinton Pledges to Stand Fast" (April 1999) - a poem written for the Philadelphia Inquirer with the stipulation presented by the newspaper that the poem be exactly 15 lines, no more, no less, and that it somehow "respond" to a story that had run in the paper in the previous week
Bob Perelman, "Must Works of Art Reflect Only Marketplace Values?" (1995)
Bob Perelman, Is there a poetry renaissance now?
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, five short sections from Renga - Draft 32 (1998)
supplemental/optional readings:
Bob Perelman on Bruce Andrews's politically radical language poetry
Ed Dorn (per Kevin Davies) on the poltiics of avant-garde poetry
Bob Perelman, brief bio
more on Bob Perelman's book, Virtual Reality
Bernadette Mayer, "Synesthetes at the Writers House"
Lee Ann Brown reviewed by Robert Hass
Lee Ann Brown, "Valentines"
Ron Silliman, In the American Tree anthology
Joan Retallack,
Joan Retallack - a reading from her poetry and a discussion of relations between innovative poetry and experimental teaching - recording of a program webcast Wednesday, February 28, 2001, at the Kelly Writers House
webcast live from the Writers House featuring Ron Silliman, Jena Osman, Bob Perelman, Brian Kim Stefans, hosted & moderated by Al Filreis with assistance from Shawn Walker, Tuesday, December 7, 7:30 PM. A recording of this webcast is available here. ()

week 12a - Dec. 6-9 - chance, procedure, non-intentionality

John Cage in performance. Cage arranges his "mesostics," vertical lines of capital letters (spelling out various names or words) with horizontal lines of varying lengths extending in both directions from each letter and incorporating the letters into new words. The horizontal lines are drawn from various "source texts," such as Ginsberg's "Howl," broken down by chance procedures (computer - aided "I Ching") and then further refined by Cage.

Marjorie Perloff, "cage: chance: change" (a chapter from her book Radical Artifice)
John Cage, "A Man Inspired by Chance"
John Cage, a selection of unaxiomatic axioms
John Cage, brief excerpt from "Writing through Howl"
tag clouds (2007)
paper option #14 Attempt in this paper to connect John Cage's "Writing through Howl" to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" as a way of explaining postmodern poetry. What is Cage trying to say about Ginsberg -- and about poetry generally -- by appropriating "Howl" in just such a way?
Joan Boonin, "Writing through English 88v"
audio: John Cage on "Empty Words" and the demilitarization of language, in a radio interview, August 8, 1974
audio: from Cage's "Themes & Variations" read by Al Filreis, Shawn Walker, and George Blaustein
Jackson Mac Low, brief biography
Mac Low interviewed by Gil Ott, 1979
"Jackson Mac Low: Poetry as Art," by Charles Bernstein
Jackson Mac Low, "Poetry and Pleasure" - a talk in which he describes his nonintentional and/or deterministic and/or chance procedures, including his "diastic reading-through text-selection method"
Jackson Mac Low, selected stanzas from "Antic Quatrains"
Jackson Mac Low, explanation of "Antic Quatrains" from the preface to Bloomsday (1984)
on Mac Low's scored piece for Peter Innisfree Moore
audio: Jackson Mac Low, "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore" (performed 1975)
an article about Peter Innisfree Moore (2004)
on the newspaper obit
"Performance Instructions preceded by Description and Compositional Method for A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore" (1974-75)
"A Vocabulary for Jackson Mac Low" (performed on December 9, 2004 by students & teachers of English 88)
Jessica Smith, "The Page Is Not a Neutral Surface" (with reference to "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore")
audio: Jackson Mac Low, "Phoneme Dance In Memoriam John Cage" (1993)
Charles Alexander reading "Near or Random Acts" (October 25, 2001) at the Kelly Writers House (an MP file)
Charles Bernstein, (a 60-second lecture)
Richard Schechner, Dionysus 1969 (1969)
Jena Osman, "Dropping Leaflets"
Jena Osman, on Dickinson's "Step lightly on / This narrow spot" from An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2994) [PDF file]
Dick Higgins, "New Song in an Old Style" (1967)
Ken Friedman, "Renter's Orchestra" (1991)
Ken Friedman, "Card Trace" (1958)
Andrew Zitcer (and others), "Aural Text Framework" (2001)
Andrew Zitcer's "stein-machine"
Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West", sound recording arranged by Jim Andrews of vispo.com (with this shockwave piece, you can listen to the poem cut-up or normally)
Ray Kurzweil's cybernetic poet
paper option #15 If you think Jackson Maclow's poem-performance based on 960 words and letters formed from the name of his deceased friend, "A Vocabulary for Peter Innisfree Moore," is both beautiful and intellectually legitimate and interesting, take the occasion of writing this paper to argue that position. Be sure to link this to your own defense of "chance" poetry in general.
Mike Magee, "Pledge" from Morning Constitutional (1999) [Note: click on "Handwritten Press," then choose "primary texts" at far right, then choose "Morning Constitutional" in Adobe Acrobat format. A brief excerpt from "Pledge" is here.
Nick Montfort, "Top Row Retort" (2000)
Tony Green's "accumulations": (1) his accumulations; (2) his piece, "Sliding Accumulation" (photo from collection of Al Filreis)
supplemental/optional readings:
word count
Jackson Mac Low wins prize
audio recording of Jackson Mac Low reading at SUNY Buffalo, 1997
a Cage filmography
Ken Friedman, "Thirty Events and Objects" (1959-1994) - a sampling
Jackson Mac Low, fluxus works
Dick Higgins, "a portrait of john cage" (1994) (Dick Higgins was one of the founders and major participants in the Fluxus movement.)
much more on Marjorie Perloff
Jackson Mac Low and Andrew Levy respond to each other during a November 1997 PhillyTalks session at the Writers House

week 12b, 13a - Dec. 9-15 - some very recent poems

Trudy Lewis, "Auntie Em"
Carla Harryman, "Toy Boats" (from there never was a rose without a thorn, 1995)
Brian Kim Stefans, "storm fields"
audio: Bob Perelman "Chiam Soutine" and "The Womb of Avant-Garde Reason"
Bob Perelman, the first page of "The Womb of Avant-Garde Reason" in The Future of Memory - an epigraph from Oscar Williams anthology Immortal Poems
Rodrigo Toscano, "Premise No. 1"

audio: Rodrigo Toscano introducing and then reading "Premise No. 1" -

Jena Osman - assisant professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. The poem we hear, "A Real Life Drama," was (says Osman) "constructed--meaning that I didn't write a single word of it, but I culled the language from an internet newsgroup which consists of transcripts of recent Supreme Court cases."

audio: Jena Osman, "A Real Life Drama"
Caroline Bergvall, "Ambient Fish"
mez and Talon Memmott, sky scratcher
Shawn Walker, "resolution" (from the ongoing "money" project) (General description of the money project: "Because for a poet writing is a daily preoccupation, I am interested in other daily habits too - the ones we create for ourselves and especially the ones we are somehow forced to assume in order to participate in what we call our society or our culture.... Money - the ubiquitous abstraction - is the daily habit I'm playing with in all these poems. For about a year and a half now, I've been writing down my daily purchases. At some point, I decided that I would rigorously document every dollar spent in 1999, and use those purchases as the formal spine of my poetic forms.") When Shawn Walker read her poems at the Writers House on September 18, 1999, she read extensively from this project; the live webcast of this reading was recorded and is available here.
audio: Louis Cabri, three poems
audio: Mike Magee, "Poem beginning with a life of O'Hara's," "A Kind of Woman," the seventh section from a long poem about rhetoric
Mike Magee, "A Kind of Woman" (text)
audio and text: Kirsten Thorpe, "In the Red," "Definitions," "The Morning," "(Reciting Lines)"
paper option #16 Consider Kirsten Thorpe's poem "(reciting lines)". What are the poem's modern and/or postmodern aspects? Be specific. What, if anything, does the poem have to do with Frost's "Mending Wall"? What, if anything, does the poem have to do with William Carlos Williams's writing?
supplemental/optional readings:
Rodrigo Toscano, brief bio
Brian Kim Stefans, brief bio
webcast live from the Writers House, Dec. 11, performance and discussion by Edwin Torres, 4:30 PM. When the day and time of the webcast arrive, click here to begin receiving the webcast signal. ()
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