part one
Instructions: Answer all three parts of each set of questions
very briefly and very precisely. There are three questions in each set. There
are four sets. That's 12 questions in all. Answer all 12 to the best of your
ability. Some are difficult, but do the best you can. Try to respond somehow
to all 12.
Guideline: Take 15 minutes for each set of three questions. Take one hour
for the whole of part one. Part 2 will take one hour, and you won't have time
to complete part 2 if you take more than one hour on part 1!
1a. Below is a poem by Emily Dickinson. What does the word "admitted" mean in the second-to-last line?
1b. Why or how can solitude of sea and solitude of death be called "these / Society"? How can solitude be said to be society?
1c. Very briefly explain how self-reference works in this poem? Is this a
poem about poetry? Briefly say how?
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself--
Finite Infinity.
2b. Now name a second thing about the lines that is modernist. Be sure not to repeat anything from your answer just above.
2c. Now name a third thing about the lines that is modernist. Be sure not to repeat. Feel free to mention, briefly, another modernist whose work is similar in this respect to these lines by Williams.
The rose is obsolete but each petal ends in an edge, the double facet cementing the grooved columns of air--The edge cuts without cutting meets--nothing--renews itself in metal or porcelain-- whither? It ends-- But if it ends the start is begun so that to engage roses becomes a geometry-- Sharper, neater, more cutting figured in majolica-- the broken plate glazed with a rose
3a. Name one way in which Ginsberg's "Howl" is not a modernist poem. Briefly explain.
3b. Name another way in which "Howl" is not modernist. Explain.
3c. Very, very briefly summarize Ginsberg's "case" against modernism. What, from the poems we've read, seems to be Ginsberg's argument against modernism?
4a. Below is Ashbery's poem "The Grapevine." Very briefly describe how he uses pronouns in the poem.
4b. Now explain how his use of pronouns in the poem has to do with postmodern poetry.
4c. Very briefly explain why knowing is so important to Ashbery. What does this say about his idea of poetry in general?
Of who we and all they are
You all now know. But you know
After they began to find us out we grew
Before they died thinking us the causes
Of their acts. Now we'll not know
The truth of some still at the piano, though
They often date from us, causing
These changes we think we are. We don't care
Though, so tall up there
In young air. But things get darker as we move
To ask them: Whom must we get to know
To die, so you live and we know?
part two
Instructions: Choose any three of these four. Answer the question by imagining a position taken by one of the poets responding to the other poet. Be sure to speak about the poet of the particular poem mentioned. (There is a difference between the Ashbery of "The One Thing That Can Save America" and the Ashbery of "The Instruction Manual.") Don't be silly--don't speak in the voice of or in the language of the poet whose position you are being asked to imagine. Be analytical. Imagine a critical point of view inhabited by one of these poets in response to another.
Guideline: Take twenty minutes to write a response to each of the three questions you choose. That will take one hour.
1. What would the Countee Cullen who wrote "Incident" say to the Frank O'Hara of "The Day Lady Died"?
2. What would the John Ashbery of "The One Thing That Can Save America" say to the Edwin Markham of "Lincoln, the Man of the People"?
3. What would the Emily Dickinson of "I dwell in possibility" say to the William Carlos Williams of "Danse Russe"?
4. What would the Shawn Walker of "Birthday on a Bridge" say to the Ezra Pound of "The Encounter"?