My favorite Preface.

This is the age of science, of steel--of speed and the cement road. The age of hard faces and hard highways. Science and steel demand the medium of prose. Speed requires only the look--the gesture. What then, for poetry?

Great need!

There are souls, in these noise-tired times, that turn aside into unfrequented lanes where the deep woods have harbored the fragrances of many a blossoming season. Here the light, filtering through perfect forms, arranges itself in lovely patterns for those who perceive beauty.

It is the purpose of this little volume to enrich, ennoble, encourage. And for man, who has learned to love convenience, it is hardly larger than his concealing pocket.

Roy J. Cook @1958

Prosemification station: a few quotes to note.

"In a democratic age, in the midst of a population which is able to read, no position is comparable for permanent influence and far-reaching power to that of an editor who understands his vocation." W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, 1886.

"Entropy is a figure of speech, then," sighed Nafastis, "a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor mot only verbally graceful, but also objectively true." Thomas Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, 1965.

"EPIHODOV: Speaking precisely, not touching upon other subjects, I'm bound to admit about myself, that destiny behaves mercilessly to me, as a storm to a little boat. If, let's suppose, I am mistaken, then why did I wake up this morning, to quote an example, and look round, and there on my chest was a spider of fearful magnitude... like this." Anton Chekhoc, in The Cherry Orchard, 1904

"La veritable eloquence consiste a dire tout ce qu'il faut, et a ne dire que ce qu'il faut." L Rouchefoucauld, 1671.

"The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else's fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger's fate, by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about." Walter Benjamin, in "The Novel as Displacement: Structuralism."

Quote of the Day.

"The Missing Generation"

"Another way to assess that decade is less thematic than generic. One of the most interesting phenomena of the 1830's is the blurring of conventional generic distinctions: Tennyson's inward-turning lyrics which chart new journeys of the mind, Browning's disruption of the conventions of historical narrative in Sordello, Dickens's imposition of a reformist vision on the eighteenth-century picaresque novel, or Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1834) by turns autobigraphical fragment, philosophical treatise, novel and editorial doodling -- possibly the biggest put-on in English literature since Tristram Shandy" (Tucker 11).

from Herbert Tucker's Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, chapter by Lawrence Poston.

Finally, I have a legit reason to dislike/dismiss Carlyle (again).

I said, I'm a teacher!

Betters, here goes nothing... I win again.

The spread? In papers, of course, that made it to final portfolios:

Maus by Art Spiegelman (FTW with a staggering): 39.
TOC by Steve Tomasula &co. (2nd, with a surprising): 13.
City of Glass by Paul Auster &co.: 10.
The Royal Tenenbaums by Wes Anderson &co.: 10.
Assorted songs by R.E.M.: 7.
"Everyday Use" by Alice Walker: 4.
"The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara: 3.
"Kiswana Browne" by Gloria Naylor: 3.
"Crying Poem" by Jimmy Santiago Baca: 2.
Assorted poems by Langston Hughes: 2.
Trouble Man by Jeff Fallis: 1.
"These Violets" by Michael Ford: 1.
"Dulce at Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen: 1.
"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou: 1.

Upsets of the semester: zero papers were submitted to portfolio covering the poems by the following forces of nature:
Rita Dove
Nikki Giovanni
Sherman Alexie
Dwight Okita
Gwendolyn Brooks
Countee Cullen
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Jean Toomer
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim

Oof indeed, and happy holidays!

Found teacher poem!

From my wonderful mother-in-law's yearbook, _GARGOYLE_ 1959:

Apologue from a Pedagogue

A teacher's life is fulled with troubles
Squirt guns, spitballs, gum that bubbles
Whispers, notes, and comic books,
Apple-polishers, dirty looks,
Spring with its resultant fever,
Earnest workers, gay deceivers,
Homework papers overdue,
Recitations and review,
Grades, with the complaints they bring
Bells that regularly ring;
Youth that always keeps its bloom,
Laughter filling up the room.
And tho I speak with indiscretion–-
I'm glad I chose this mad profession!

Not Not Notley

Some words and spaces:

Sept 17/August 29, '88

We get out of the car and I think I see him he waves coming from the woods.
Looks like our dad, shape of head and current
slenderness, moustache; is wearing dark glasses
at seeing each other. We go into lobby of

rehab

,

Margaret and I get visitors' tags, girl asks if we're twins.
Al has to give up our birthday presents for him.
He says he can't stand to be inside; we climb a hill
and sit down on a bench...

Bet your bottom dollar!

Collaboration

I'm on a winning streak here.
I am not a poet.
I am not a painter.
You are a poet and
a painter.

Does that sound good to you so far?
Yeah. Now tell me this. "Write not better yet."

Will me ween me; wine and diner, jelly bean who?
Write a paper light a votive step down. What.


Spot the errors and win a prize --
Otherwise
lies are lies.



p.s. Henry says write "poop" for the end of the poem. I'm on the fence here.

World's Most Boring Bloggage Brought to you here for free by me.

I have integrity, and also a discerning palate.

Paper Three Topics

Assignment: Write at least one thousand words upon one of the following suggested topics.
Due: draft one uploaded to by classtime on Monday November 15th. Final draft by Friday November 19th
Note: if you haven't already, please familiarize yourself with MLA form. You can do so through or here: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/


“Captain Obvious, say Hello to Team America World Police!” In her book Literature Portfolio, Dr. Christy Desmet introduces poetry study as follows:

You have been “studying” poetry ever since you were born. While your early lessons may have been unconscious, all the nursery rhymes, preschool songs, riddles, limericks, jump rope ditties, Dr. Seuss books, and advertising jingles of your youth made a home in your memory and a place for poetry. Humans are universally attracted to the sounds, textures, and layered meanings of poetry and poetic language. (351)

For this paper, think about how Dr. Desmet, the director of First-Year Composition here at UGA, chooses her language. Then, write a paper that considers the ramifications of this introduction for your own understanding of poetic language OR seeks to define the intangible kinds of poetic exploration that can be achieved through song, harmony, performance, etc.

Poetry is... but “poetry” is not...

Poetry and poetic language surround us It's important to remember that no sharp distinction exists between poetry and prose; we look instead, at a continuum, with poetry on one end and prose on the other... (351).

For this topic, think about one of the poets who came to class, and discuss how they defined or explained their poetry. Quote them aplenty, please.

Choose your own adventure paper!

... Develop an intelligent argument about any song, film, video, clip, conversation, poem, story, or work we've covered in class. YouTube is a completely valid and valuable source here, as long as you cite properly.


Works Cited

Desmet, Christy, D. Alexis Hart, and Deborah Church Miller, eds. Prentice Hall Literature Portfolio. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2007. Print.

La Vie Boheme.

Things that make me smile:
1. Charles Wayne Ramsey
2. Henry Wilson Ramsey
3. Loretta Frances Ramsey
4. Frances Cherry Daniel Austin & Mappy
5. France
6. Maestro
7. Wilson
8. Tennis
9. New York City
10. R.E.M.
11. The 'rents
12. Mary Engel
13. Poems by poets I know like:

http://www.turntablebluelight.com/2007/09/michael_ford.html

14. ... and:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7naKj-z5So

15. Also: "The Fist"
The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

16. And! At the Poet's Forum this weekend! Like me!
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/07/12/100712crbo_books_orourke

17. And, obviously:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNBKM5so8tQ

18. But also: life! and lists! and coffee shops! Beer! Scholarship! Academia!
19. The Library of Congress and The Academy of American Poets
20. Hope, and my homies that helped me along the way. <3

Things that rock:

Rock stars.

Captain Obvious reporting for duty.

Hardy + New Pornography =

One:
The skirts go up
Before the war
Among the madding crowds
They're ruined like the rest of us ruined
Rest of us ruined
You are a living doll
Riding a circle tracks
Behind the walls of clocks
And you ruined
Like the rest of us ruined
Rest of us ruined

Traffic was slow for the crash years
There's no other show like it 'round here
As a rule
Windows were rolled for the crash years
There's no other show like it 'round here
As a rule

Two:
Now this romantic duel is into the streets
Bon appetit, you've eaten me alive you realize

This is not the way
In the streetlight dawn
This beat turns on
This boy's life among the electrical lights

Three:
'Did anybody ever want to marry you, miss?' Liddy ventured to ask when they were again alone. 'Lots of 'em, I daresay?'
Bathsheba paused, as if about to refuse a reply, but the temptation to say yes, since it really was in her power, was irresistible by aspiring virginity, in spite of her spleen at having been published as old.
'A man wanted to once,' she said in a highly experienced tone, and the image of Gabriel Oak, as the farmer, rose before her.
'How nice it must seem!' said Liddy, with the fixed features of mental realization. 'And you wouldn't have him?'
'He wasn't quite good enough for me.'
'How sweet to be able to disdain, when most of us are glad to say, "Thank you!" I seem to hear it. "No sir -- I'm your better," or "Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence." And did you love him, miss?'
Far From the Madding Crowd (81)

Like Art...

... Spiegelman? Me too. I'm covering MAUS in the lit class this week.

But this time I'm talking about Art like sculptures and stuff, and the person I'm plugging is my super bff Mary.

http://www.maryengel.net/

She's obviously famous and awesome. Buy yourself a piece or twenty, please.

_My Life._

...isn't always here.

You people are always virtual work trying to hate.
I'm no hater, and I don't condone the hate-o-philia.
Comprendez vous? En italien? Non? Moi aussi, y "Paris, je t'aime,"
but "New York, I love You."

But, seriously, I love you.

If Eve said it, it would sound more Wall-E-ish.

"Directive"
Back out of all of this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like a graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry––
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Chuck's Extra Credit.

"In _Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History_" John Egerton narrates a tour of over 200 restaurants throughout the South. . Using a fairly strict set of criteria, he eats at and writes about small restaurants, diners, cafes, etc., that represent what Southern food is. He does not tackle the question of differences between Southern and soul food but the subject comes up often in interviews and ."

"The cooks and owners he interviews seem to be at least concerned with the distinction between Southern and soul food. One restaurant he characterizes as a soul-food diner make the similarity explicit. The owner, Lucille Cole, says, 'Soul food, Southen food, call it what you want... It's all the same: beans and greens, yams and chicken -- it's what a mother cooks at home for her family.'"

Page the first, for HIS 400S, Dr. Simon, 2.2.97

Infinite Jest...

it isn't about Hal any more or less than Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is about Oskar Schell. It's of course about becoming yourself...again.

Augmented Vortices: Objectivism & Imagism, Oppen & H.D.

Discrete Series (1934): In the preface, Pound opened by preempting the charge of obscurity, then acknowledging a cry for originality and a call for reform, and closed with a "salute" to a "serious craftsman." Though vague, this preface intuits a likely response to Oppen's collection: an uncertainty of both the coherence of the 'series' and the sensibility of the 'craft.' The crux of the volume, though, reiterates mathematical and logical exercises of incompleteness, begging the reader to anticipate obliqueness in knowledge as necessary and valid. That is, rather than enforcing a stringent dedication to image as the thing, Oppen's brand of Objectivism (which differed from Zukofsky's) relied upon the value of incompleteness and omission as crucially resonant operators in the poetic object. So as Oppen delivers a poetic experience that emphasizes sincerity and linguistic commitment, he also enacts the vertiginous conundrums of Wittgenstein and Godel. In verifying the gaps and voicing the silences, Oppen allows his poems to be both conversational and muted, obscure and evocative. The open structure of the book, in which some poems are titled, some numbered, others unlabeled, creates a poetic experience that feels experimental and productive: it begins with an inclusion of multiple poetic voices, develops among images and actions, and concludes in a veritable force field of uncertainty, with "Happenings" and "(the telephone)"

Though Oppen and H.D. can easily be contrasted, most obviously using their -ISM definitions, distinctions, and associations, the poems of the 1930s share the exploration of a multivocal poetics that invites ephemeral experience and growth in radiation. Poems like "Magician," "Calypso," and "The Poet" deliver vigorous testaments to H.D.'s ability to marry the animal, visceral voices with those enchanted and melodious, compacting a volatile harmony of friction and fantasy. She dissolves distinctions between subject and object, action and story: all contribute to the sorcery of Song. In the mythic and particular, the collection of solos, these later poems, like Oppen's, offer experiences in series, and they do so by enlivening defiance and argumentation as constructive forces. Louder than Oppen's, it seems, these poems by H.D. showcase the roaring rush of the poetic vortex in which soundtrack accompanies the Imagist's eye.

Older School.

from an earlier love "letter"

[Message: Read]
chuck ramsey [himynameischuck@yahoo.com]
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Tuesday, December 23, 2003 1:19 AM
To:
M
Caroline Ruth daniel Ramsey
[Send Error Report] [Copy error details to clipboard]
Apparently you've already forgotten about me.
My name is Chuck. I live in Athens, GA with my two
dogs, Bella and Soap, and the occasional visit from my
gilfriend, Caroline. It's not the nicest house in the
world, but it's comfortable. I went to school at UGA,
but realized toward the end of my scholarly career
that academics were not for me, thus I chose a life in
the kitchen. Sweat, burns, cuts and hard labor were
in store for me. The pay is not great but the work I
love. I thought I had it all figured out until my
intelligent, beautiful, wonderful girlfriend left for
St. Lucia and fell in love with a wealthy, debonair
European man ten years older than her. Then it all
fell apart. The drinking, the cigarettes, the crying.
Wave upon wave of sorrow. Just to hear her voice one
more time saying, "I love you." All in vain, the
trial and struggles and triumphs and defeats. Such is
life, no sunshine and no roses, only a pale grey sky
muting the fading colors summer. And now I sleep,
only to awaken to a world of sorrow and anguish, from
which puppies and eight-hour car trips cannot save me.
To my lost love, I say, "What did I do? Where did I
go wrong?"
Caroline, I love you, of this you can be sure.
Chuck.

Read This Now. Ed's book, I mean.

from:

Labors Lost Left Unfinished by Ed Pavlic.

...

A deep breath domes
against your face & you hope
you'll never cease to love

...

That is all.

Verse re: Word.

From our new poet laureate, W. S. Merwin:

TERM

At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do

Online Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/merwin/term.htm

Deliveries, DeLillories: Daily Bread.

"In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. the system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies" (46).

#defenses against racking fears of self, "White Noise."

Out-of/Inside Context 101.

_although of course you end up becoming yourself_, page 115:

READING LADY: I'm sure if you have any questions, David wouldn't mind answering them.
FIRST QUESTION: How do you get your ideas?

...

AFTER READING
HUNGRY MIND BOOKSTORE
THE SIGNING LINE
A LONG, EXCITED LINE

[It's not an easy process. People want to talk. They're thrilled when they get to the table: blushing, excited. David draws a smiley face next to each signature. One woman looks at hers with a frown. She's not sure what it is; she believes he's drawn a computer.]

It's a smiley face. If you want, I could put Wite-Out over it. It's your book.

[Someone pulls out a copy of _Broom of the System_]

Oh no. This old thing.

[After the signature, he does a birthday-candle blow over the ink, to dry it.]

Little, Brown taught me that.

from page xv: "He wrote with eyes and a voice that seemed to be a condensed form of everyone's lives..."

Cut/Pastries: Proof's in the Pudding.

Independent update Re: "the beauty of the light of music": "I think about this world a lot & I cry & I've seen!"... but I'm in this kitchen! WITH DON DELILLO'S _WHITE NOISE_... so everything is beautiful in the space of the language, and indeterminate outside.

A passage from said novel, that a teacher much older and wiser reminded me to remember:

"We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now."

I hope people are still "immensely pleased" because, like teachers and scribes before me, I feel compelled to record with accuracy and humility, but I'm unable to explain comprehensively.

The aforementioned teacher also gave me a book, _Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace_. This gift made me feel terribly grateful and sad, because I feel that the brilliant voices of the generation will always either fail to impress effectively or fall silent too quickly. I hope that's just cynicism and disappointment talking...

Mythopoietic Conversions! Happy Freedom Day, y'all.

Read: Rilke's "Der Magier"

THE MAGICIAN, Romantic-like (French, English, Italian, and

Le magicien, les yeux tout creux et vides,
emet le mot qui correspond...
Et Deja nait, dans le silence aride,
le trouble sourd d'un gros remous fecond.

(His eyes shallow and empty, the magician
utters the corresponding word...
And in the arid silence, the deaf chaos
of a great fertile tide is already born.)

L'excite-t-il, ou bien deja l'arrete?
Et qui l'emporte --, est-ce le magicien?
On concoit qu'un fait fatal complete
son geste qui ordonne et retient.

(Che egli non eccitare o che già lo stop?
E chi lo porta via - il mago?
Noi concepiamo solo un fatto irreversibile completo
ordina che il suo gesto e mantiene)

Le mot agit, et nul le reprend.
Soudain, a certaines heures, ce qu'on nomme
devient...quoi? Un etre...presque homme,
et on le tue, en le nommant.

(Se mueve la palabra y nadie lo capta.
De pronto, a ciertas horas se convierte en lo que denominamos
BECOMES... WHAT?... A BEING... ALMOST HUMAN,
AND, NAMING IT, WE KILL IT.)

:(

+ Elizabeth Bishop "Late Air"

From a magician's midnight sleeve
the radio-singers
distribute all their love-songs
over the dew-wet lawns.
And like a fortune teller's
their marrow-piercing guesses are whatever you believe.

But on the Navy Yard aerial I find
better witnesses
for love on summer nights.
Five remote red lights
keep their nests there; Phoenixes
burning quietly, where the dew cannot climb.

= + one ART
(Man-Moth)

...Then from the lids/one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips./ Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention/he'll swallow it.

AND

against my love
against my will
become art

The Library of Congress, or: "Perhaps you'll answer correctly tomorrow, Canada!"

My new ID says I should probably write this down:

The Library of Congress is BEAUTIFUL... especially if you keep walking through the proper tunnels and doorways into the place where real work can happen. It's called Jefferson, y'all, like ye ole president we had, and it's really neat to learn how to get there.

I was taught by very many people, including 1st and foremost, my mom & dad, my "Brothers&Sisters," Porter-Gaud School, The University of Georgia, and all the athletic associations associated with them.

I appreciate all of these priv...GIFTS very much and, like Lee Greenwood SANG:

I'm proud to be an American. Where at least I know I'm free. And I won't ever forget ANY OF THAT SHIT! EVER! Especially not the Beatles. <3

Corol Lir... "Nothing, my lord."

Did you see this performed at UCLA's Royce Hall in October 2007?

http://www.mckellen.com/stage/lear07/la.htm

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/king-lear/watch-the-play/487/

Chuck and I did, along with some others who cared to travel there then. We both think a lot of things about the play and the experience. :P

1. ACROSS CLUE: "theanyspacewhatever" 2008

nancy spector: "an exhibition in ten parts"

"Paradigm shifts in art are not always decade specific. They can take place at any point in time, seemingly at random, but usually as a counterpoint to what happened before. Regardless of this fact, art movements tend to be thought of in ten-year sequences; Abstract Expressionism, for instance, belongs to the 1950s, and Pop art, the 1960s. Such classifications are often applied in retrospect since it is not always possible to comprehend fundamentally different stylistic and conceptual strategies until well after they first appear. Years can PASS before the implications of such RADICAL changes in art history and culture-at-large are absorbed, parsed, and ultimately defined." page the 13th.

from "Personism: A Manifesto" (FOH p.498):

"Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man's Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can't be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

*** I Am Not A Painter ***

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

**************************

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Johns

"In Memory of My Feelings"

8/8/82

_The Ringing Ear_:
Sharan Strange
"Night Work"
In the changeling air before morning
they are silhouettes. Dark ones
with the duskiness of predawn on them
and the shading of dust and sweat.
Busying themselves in buidlings,
on scaffolds, and on the black
washed pavements, they are phantoms
of the city--guardians of parking lots
and lobby desks, tollbooths, meters,
the all-nights and delivery trucks.
At bus stops they are sentinels
and the drivers. Launderers and cleaners
readying the offices and untidy houses
of privilege. Cooks heaping up meals
for the well fed, the disabled, or the indifferent.
Trash-takers, making room for more.
Nurses, eternally watching.

(page 21)

I love ampersands, California, and Watermelons... perennially.

from _The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revisited_ ed. Allen & Butterick
copyrights: 1982!

The Stillness of the Poem

The stillness of the jungle
a clearing amid the vines
which distant bird sounds enter,
timidly. The overpowering silence
of the jungle clearing
into which Rhinoceri &
other wild beasts are always
charging suddenly from the canebrake
to reveal themselves
one instant
in all their natural savagery
or fear,
their nature made known to us
out of the jungle's quiet.

The stillness of the poem
a moment full of silence &
portent, like
the sudden halt of great machines.
Silence that becomes a fabric
to clothe the consciousness
... the events & observations of
a walk up Market Street
are admitted, as if
from a great distance,
the White Rhinoceros
charging
suddenly, in the form of a sailor
with a shopping bag
whom nobody notices.

Ron Loewinsohn b. 1937
University of California, Berkeley.

http://berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/1998/0715/loewinsohn.html

Front-Of-House, Frank-O'-Hara
"To the Harbormaster"

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To you
I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you. (1957)

...and ASHBERY! from "How Much Longer Will I Be Able To Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher..."

As if reading had any interest for me, you...
Now you are laughing.
Darkness interrupts my story
Turn on the light.

Meanwhile what am I going to do?
I am growing up again, in school, the crisis will be very soon.
And you twist the darkness in your fingers, you
Who are slightly older...

http://arthistory.about.com/od/from_exhibitions/ig/jasper_johns_0708/graymma_01.htm

I don't need "permission" to "publish" _TENNYSON_. Fools.

June Day, Moon Day... Jasper Johns toosday.

JASPER JOHNS
35 YEARS
LEO CAVALLI
*how do you do the copyright symbol*?
@1993
ed. Susan Brundage
essay Judith Goldman
Design Smatt Florence

also:

"Spiralineartime: Religious Calendar Formation, Momentum, and Change Within a Dynamic Time Structure" by Sarah Emily Richards.

*Both are well-written and -designed. Read 'em and weep. Literally.*

Daily Activities for Rogue Artist and Teacher.

"Poor wandering one" a "perfect and delightful example" of "operacrobatics"

ALL.

By a doctor of divinity,
Who resides in this vicinity,
By a doctor, a doctor, a doctor,
Of divinity, of divinity.

MABEL (coming forward).

RECITATIVE.

Hold, monsters! Ere your pirate caravanseri
Proceed, against our will, to wed us all,
Just bear in mind that we are Wards in Chancery,
And father is a Major-General.

Sam. (cowed). We'd better pause, or danger may befall,
Their father is a Major-General.

Girls. Yes, yes; he is a Major-General!

(The Major-General has entered unnoticed, on rock.)

Gen. Yes, I am a Major-General!

...

Song -- Major-General.*
note 452-96: _I am the very model of a modern Major-General_
"Major-General Stanley introduces himself in one of the fastest and most famous of all the Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs. It must also be one of the most parodied. The American comedian Tom Lehrer set the entire table of chemical elements to the tune, beginning 'There's antimony, arsenic, aluminium, selenium'.
In its original version the song began 'I am the very pattern of a modern Major-General'. Its distinctive rhythm, with sixteen syllables to the line, is found in the Grand Duke Rudolph's song 'A pattern to professors of monarchal autonomy' in _the Grand Duke_, which contains the major-general-like line 'I weigh out tea and sugar with precsion mathematical'."

Gee whiz, Ian, you may have the experience of "Gilbert and Sullivan" existing as "very much a male taste" ... but this chick can stomach it just fine. Maybe it was you, just a decade or two ago.

Memorial Day 2010: What We Love and Are

"Memorial Day 1950" FOH:

Through all that surgery I thought
I had a lot to say, and named several last things
Gertrude Stein hadn't had time for; but then
the war was over, those things had survived
and even when you're scared art is no dictionary

"Mother and Poet" EBB (1862)

5
To teach them... It stings there! _I_ made them indeed
Speak plain the word _country_. _I_ taught them, no doubt,
That a country's a thing men should die for at need.
_I_ prated of liberty, rights, and about
The tyrant cast out.

"In Memoriam A. H. H." (1850)

5
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er.
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

"Praise Song for the Day" (E.A. 1.20.09)

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, _Take out your pencils. Begin_.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by _love thy neighbor as thyself_,
others by _first do no harm_ or _take no more
than you need_. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

A Real Compsy One, in celebration of my Annotated Bibliographing.

Well, y'all, I'll tell you: I've been working in the office this week, and it feels purty dang good to be doing the research like I love to do. A development -- in a beautiful embrace of all things academic -- my annotated bibliography of secondary sources, growing like the weeds that are my lawn and the children that are my heart. My favorite entry, here presented for you (especially Hillary Brown) because it was a delightful surprise amid some boring bookaroos. Also because I have the only copy of the book in town, and I'm not planning on parting with it... yet. So read! And most importantly email me your thoughts!

So here it is, MLAed and everything (except for spacing. Thanks an effing lot, html.):


Disher, Maurice Willson. Blood and Thunder: The Mid-Victorian Melodrama and its Origins. London: Frederick Muller LTD, 1949.

First: “Puff Preliminary” provides a great start: odd, interesting, charmingly hilarious. Anti- the “coldly contemplative eye,” this author introduces an “academic spirit” giving a “rash attempt to chart imagination… [that’s] heavily engaged, like your own, in the struggle to grow up” (5).

Prologue: “Popular Imagination in the melodrama and penny dreadful” – likens spurious ideas to counterfeit (or “queer”) coinage, in that “it came into currency unquestioned, was vouched for by responsible persons, and could not be exposed as counterfeit without upsetting everybody’s reckoning.” “Queer it undoubtedly is,” he writes, “for it has always been interpreted to mean, not a universal contempt for worldly advantages but the reverse—a belief that virtue, though held to be its own reward, is not so unprofitable financially as might be supposed… THE COUNTERFEIT IDEA? the general abuse of “popular fiction” (11-12). Authors also to blame, for dipping from the “stock-pot from which each drew out much and put in little or nothing at all.” (12) Fiction = a brew, in which “there is, or was, a powerful uniformity of wishes” (12). BELIEF IN “Virtue Triumphant”… “There is no parting the two strains, moral and political, in the imagination of the nineteenth-century masses. They are hopelessly entangled” (13). Great Quote: “Democracy shaped its own entertainments at a time when the vogue of Virtue Triumphant was at its height and they took their pattern from it. This merging is the freak of human nature we call melodrama, a word at present denoting self-righteous emotionalism that recalls a bygone, exaggerated style of acting” (14). “Here are Virtue Triumphant’s attendant errors: confusion between sacred and profane, between worldly and spiritual advancement, between self-interest and self-sacrifice, and other hypocrisies which create a peculiar insensibility to the absurd. All this is known as Victorianism and vulgarly supposed to have been brought about through Queen Victoria’s influence” (14). “Victorianism owes less to Queen Victoria than to Madame de Maintenon, that paragon of rigid and affluent piety, desperately clutching shreds of outward grandeur to cover the shame of early vagabondage” (15). “Such typical Victorians as Darwin and Ruskin tried to make popular opinion more adult, but in vain” (15).

Pockets on Fire, or, "Thanks, Chuck!"

I wrote you a poem and gave it to you,
and it was the most beautiful thing I felt
until
You wrote me a poem and gave it to me.
Then another, signed and dated:
Chuck 2010
#pocketsfullofpoems/hearts

"I just wanna set you on fire so I won't have to burn alone"... Elizabeth Bishop wrote stories, too.

So here I'm posting notes, as opposed to my original work, in the form of quotes from Elizabeth Bishop's prose. There's a lot to be said about her under-recognized fiction (and autobiographical) writing, but for now I thought I'd offer some salient nuggets to provide evidence concerning her aesthetic m.o. (I'm also reading the Complete Poems this week, and the prose makes a lovely companion for the poetry.)

“the writing coming off the pages of her diary, turning to life again, as it had happened.”[1]:

An Assortment of Elizabeth Bishop’s Prose Writings

“Primer Class”

Only the third and fourth graders studied geography. On their side of the room, over the backboard, were two rolled-up maps, one of Canada and one of the world. When they had a geography lesson, Miss Morash pulled down one or both of these maps, like window shades. They were on cloth, very limp, with a shiny surface, and in pale colors–tan, pink, yellow, and green–surrounded by the blue that was the ocean. The light coming in from their windows, falling on the glazed, crackly surface, made it hard for me to see them properly from where I sat. On the world map, all of Canada was pink; on the Canadian, the provinces were different colors. I was so taken with the pull-down maps that I wanted to snap them up, and pull them down again, and touch all the countries and provinces with my own hands. (10)

My initial experiences of formal education were on the whole pleasurable. Reading and writing caused me no suffering. I found the first easier, but the second was enjoyable–I mean artistically enjoyable–and I came to admire my own handwriting in pencil, when I came to that stage, perhaps as a youthful Chinese student might admire his own brushstrokes. It was wonderful to see that the letters each had different expressions, and that the same letter had different expressions at different times. Sometimes the two capitals of my name looked miserable, slumped down and sulky, but at others they turned fat and cheerful. (12)

“Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore”

Poems like “An Octopus” about a glacier, or “Peter,” about a cat, or “Marriage,” about marriage, struck me, as they still do, as miracles of language and construction. Why had no one ever written about things in this clear and dazzling way before? (123)

I got to Madison Square Garden very early–we had settled on the hour because we wanted to see the animals before the show began–but Marianne was there ahead of me. She was loaded down: two blue cloth bags, one on each arm, and two huge brown paper bags, full of something. I was given one of these. They contained, she told me, stale brown bread for the elephants, because stale brown bread was one of the things they liked best to eat. (I later suspected that they might like stale white bread just as much but that Marianne had been thinking of their health.) (125)

I do not remember her ever referring to Emily Dickinson, but on one occasion, when we were walking in Brooklyn on our way to our favorite tea shop, I noticed we were on a street associated with the Brooklyn Eagle, and I said fatuously, “Marianne, isn’t it odd to think of you and Walt Whitman walking this same street over and over?” She exclaimed, in her mock-ferocious tone, “Elizabeth, don’t speak to me about that man!” So I never did again. (143)

Surely there is an element of mortal panic and fear underlying all works of art? (144)

I find it impossible to draw conclusions or even to summarize. When I try to, I become foolishly bemused: I have a sort of subliminal glimpse of the capital letter M multiplying. I am turning the pages of an illuminated manuscript and seeing that initial letter again and again: Marianne’s monogram; mother; manners; morals; and I catch myself murmuring, “Manners and morals; manners as morals? Or is it morals as manners?” Since, like Alice, “in a dreamy sort of way,” I can’t answer either question, it doesn’t much matter which way I put it; it seems to be making sense. (156).

“The Sea & Its Shore”

Once, on one of our large public beaches, a man was appointed to keep the sand free from papers. For this purpose he was given a stick, or staff, with a long polished wire nail set in the end.

Since he worked only at night, when the beach was deserted, he was also given a lantern to carry.

The rest of his equipment consisted of a big wire basket to burn the papers in, a box of matches for setting fire to them, and a house…

As a house it was more like an idea of a house than a real one. It could have stood at either end of a scale of ideas of houses. It could have been a child’s perfect playhouse, or an adult’s ideal house–since everything that makes most houses nuisances had been done away with.

It was a shelter, but not for living in, for thinking in. It was, to the ordinary house, what the ceremonial thinking cap is to the ordinary hat. (171-2)

But the papers had no discernible goal, no brain, no feeling or race or group. They soared up, fell down, could not decide, hesitated, subsided, flew strait to their doom in the sea, or turned over in mid-air to collapse on the sand without another motion. (174)

His studies could be divided into three groups, and he himself classified them mentally in this way.

First, and most numerous: everything that seemed to be about himself, his occupation in life, and any instructions or warnings that referred to it.

Second: the stories about other people that caught his fancy, whose careers he followed from day to day in newspapers and fragments of books and letters; and whose further adventures he was always watching out for.

Third: the items he could not understand at all, that bewildered him completely but at the same time interested him so much that he saved them to read. These he tried, almost frantically, to fit into first one, then the other, of the two categories. (175)

Either because of the insect armies of type so constantly besieging his eyes, or because it was really so, the world, the whole world he saw, came before many years to seem printed, too. (178)

But the point was that everything had to be burned at last. All, all had to be burned, even bewildering scraps that he had carried with him for weeks or months. Burning paper was his occupation, by which he made his living, but over and above that, he could not allow his pockets to become too full, or his house to become littered.

Although he enjoyed the fire, Edwin Boomer did not enjoy its inevitability. Let us leave him in his house, at four one in the morning, his reading selected, the conflagration all over, the lantern shining clearly. It is an extremely picturesque scene, in some ways like a Rembrandt, but in many ways not. (180)

---

[1] From “The Diary of ‘Helene Morely’: The Book & It’s Author”

Plain Clever: Seacole's Syntax To the (Reader's) Rescue.

Reading: The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857)

(This is a real gem of a memoir, for those unfamiliar.)

Syntactic Manipulation, Textual Domination.

Upon rereading The Wonderful Adventures..., I recalled a class discussion about Seacole’s moments of coyness/discretion that were conspicuously performative. I’m thinking, most specifically, about a conversation regarding her overly-playful holding-back of information (her age, e.g.), but I speak also to mentions of other descriptions of her attention to decorum. In many cases, her syntax becomes directly invested in this coyness, to the extent that her language feels rhetorically disordered, even muddled, or openly flat. In such instances, her words seem contrived with the specific intention to emphasize her devotion to decorum (which includes genuine humility) and her true capability and skill in her occupation. That is, Seacole capitalizes on her command of language by constructing clever pockets of logic that force her reader to at once acknowledge her capability and her humility while she maintains a mask of ignorance or simple-mindedness that covers her tracks. One noteworthy phenomenon is Seacole’s (over)use of parenthetical material to temper her statements with affirmations of personal pride. Even though she packages such claims for self-legitimacy as barely-significant afterthoughts, she often constrains her language to avoid appearing any way other than humble.

Several Examples:

And here I must pause to set myself right with my kind reader. He or she will not, I hope, think that, in narrating these incidents, I am exalting my poor part unduly. I do not deny (it is indeed the only thing that I have to be proud of) that I am pleased and gratified when I look upon my past life, and see times now and then, and places here and there, when and where I have been enabled to benefit my fellow-creatures suffering from the ills my skill could often remedy. (25-26)

This passage continues as Seacole attributes her personal “strength” to “Providence,” but she moves next to degrade “strength” to mere “usefulness” (26).

Also:

Need I be ashamed to confess that I shared in the general enthusiasm, and longed more than ever to carry my busy (and the reader will not hesitate to add experienced) fingers where the sword or bullet had been busiest, and the pestilence most rife. (75)

In this case, Seacole employs the familiar technique of shying from rhetorical accountability by assigning the reader’s discerning authority. Such a tactic really confounds the prose, however, as it once again disrupts sentential flow and thwarts grammatical continuity. The sentence must likely be reread to follow the initial logical trajectory to fruition, or at least to register the weight of the supposedly-central idea.

And most tellingly:

Of course, had it not been for my old strong-mindedness (which has nothing to do with obstinacy, and is in no way related to it–the best term I can think of to express it being “judicious decisiveness”), I should have given up the scheme a score of times in as many days; so regularly did each successive day give birth to a fresh set of rebuffs and disappointments. I shall make no excuse to my readers for giving them a pretty full history of my struggles to become a Crimean heroine!

My first idea (and knowing that I was well fitted for the work, and would be the right woman in the right place, the reader can fancy my audacity) was to apply to the War Office for the post of hospital nurse. (76)

The first aside allows Seacole to insert her preemptive rebuttal to possible accusations of obstinacy (a term of course used to undermine female resolve) while defusing it by enclosing it parenthetically. The effect, however, cannot be ignored – judicious decisiveness resounds to overshadow the polite prose that follows. The conclusion, of course, emphasizes her role as heroine as appropriate, intentional, and earned. The next set of parentheses enclose another aside of personal affirmation that, in its choppy list of proof-reasoning, distracts the reader from the main thrust of the sentence (her “idea… to apply”), and forces one to instead consider her aptness on her terms.

In his introductory preface to this work, Times correspondent W.H. Russell commends Seacole’s story as one of the “trials and sufferings, dangers and perils, encountered boldly by a helpless woman”. He specifically notes her linguistic simplicity – she is not “verbose”, but “a plain truth-speaking woman” – in an introduction that lauds her vulnerability and her simple-mindedness. Such prefatory remarks to this work must indicate either Russell’s analytical naivety or his eagerness to sell Seacole’s story to those who might find her capability discomforting.

You Don't Have to Light My Fire Because It's Already Lit and Burns For You, Subtly.

In the first Inscription “One’s-self I Sing,” Whitman introduces Leaves of Grass with a lofty, confidant assessment of the grand project to follow. While often we dwell upon Whitman’s poetics of subjectivity, it’s important to remind ourselves, as we move through Leaves of Grass, of his greater Democratic goals. Hardly a solipsistic autobiographer, Whitman focuses intently on recording, translating, and celebrating the consciousness of the nation. In doing this, though, he doesn’t simply give glimpses/examples that he feels characterizes his America. While he employs these observational techniques quite often, he also attempts to craft a poetics of oneness with his readers, promising to tell them what they are, and why and how.

Thus, he writes “One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse” – he writes not of himself here, but “one’s-self”… and the later, larger “Song of Myself” sings a song of and for the masses: “Of life immense in Passion, pulse, and power / Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine / The Modern Man I sing.”

Leaves of Grass shows significant investment in (and reflection upon) this poetic goal to discover his readers, as they are and as he imagines them to be. He emphasizes most of all the deep connection between his readers (or his masses) and himself, as he the poet/prophet has been called and inspired to produce voluminous poetic documentation on their behalf. As he writes in “O You to Whom I Often and Silently Come”: “Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is / playing within me.”

"all that blab"

Reading: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass

Brief Intro: I decided that Leaves of Grass is too rich and varied to post upon the work as a whole without overgeneralizing or summarizing. Instead, I thought I'd post a close analysis of poems that I found particularly interesting or moving this time around. Not surprisingly, the poem I had the most to say/think about was "As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life," namely as it feels so modern and theoretically connected to 20th C. poets and their projects. So here I reflect upon the conflated voice(s) of that poem:

Whitman's Sound Poetry?

As a poem that begins amid contemporaneous motion and documentation, “As I Ebb’d With the Ocean of Life” flows into and out of the consciousness of the speaker. The poem moves as both component and product of this greater consciousness, just as the poet-speaker considers himself a distinct individual and also part of some greater whole. One manifestation of this conflict seems to be in the poet’s understanding of his own voice, of its quality and significance. The tension here builds, appropriately, as the poem progresses: the “pride” of the “electric self” (7) diminishes as the poet feels helpless finding the “real Me,” and the poems he utters become “arrogant” and foolish (34). As the poem delves in to these complexities and conflicts of self-awareness, the poem charts the dissolution of distinct sound articulation, and considers the obvious paradox of poems as silent songs. That is, this poem shows the reality that poems are merely words on a page meant to represent sounds that are then meant to represent consciousness of some kind, but it more importantly wonders whether this distant representation of reality really documents some song of the poet or song of life.

In the first section of the poem, the poet exists as part of the “ocean of life” (1), but he hears distinct sounds that are not his. As the ocean meets the shore, its voice is composed of the sounds of the “ripples” and these components’ voices are “hoarse and sibilant” (3). In other words, the voice that the poet hears emerging from this ocean of life is made up of smaller voices that are rough and deep, raucous and husky, hissing and whistling. They are unclear, indistinct – the voice of the ocean cannot be discerned as clear sounds. This ocean’s roar, like white noise, moves with the “sound of breaking waves” (16), but it also hints at disapproval with its harsh, hissing tones. Even when he considers himself to be a part of this ocean, then, he hears judgment in its voice(s).

In contrast to the indistinct sounds that surround him, the poet utters. He sends out his words to articulate some clear message amid the muddled musical background. The second section moves to point out his foolishness – his attempt at clarity becomes an “arrogant” failure, for no “real” articulation exists “amid all that blab” (33-34). He hears “peals of laughter” at his “every word”: the disapproval now definite, though still not from a singular source (38). Disapproval moves him to silence, to run from the oppression caused when he “dared to open his mouth to sing at all” (43). The third section begins with the poet in close proximity with these “oceans both” (44). The image of the open mouth at the end of the second section, however, forces the double pronunciations and meanings of the homograph “close” (44). In other words, the image is one of the poet becoming close in proximity with the oceans, but it can also be the poet closing his mouth. In the latter option, the poet closes his mouth with the oceans and gives himself over to become a true part of it, an indistinct sonar component that contributes without pride. All components “murmur alike” in one low and continuous voice, each ego subdued. This murmuring, the “murmuring / I envy”, communicates the “secret” sounds that the poet longs to understand, to translate (61-62). These sounds are also the ones he fears, however, as the murmurs seem to also be sounds of accusation or complaint. The final section mourns, then, that the poet must lose his distinct voice to become one with the ocean of life. As the mutable world rushes around him, though, the poet opens his mouth and sings his song – he gets the distinct voice until his “I” (1) becomes the “we” that “lie in drifts at your feet” (77).

"that interminable list!"

20th Century American Literature:

Poetry:
John Ashbery Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)
Ted Berrigan The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (1969)
John Berryman The Dream Songs (1969)
Elizabeth Bishop The Complete Poems: 1927-1979
Gwendolyn Brooks Blacks (1987)
Hart Crane The Bridge (1930)
Anne Carson Autobiography of Red (1998)
H.D. Collected Poems: 1912-1944
Rita Dove Museum (1983)
Sonata Mulattica (2009)
T.S. Eliot Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
The Waste Land (1922)
Ash Wednesday (1930)
Four Quartets (1943)
Robert Frost The Poetry of Robert Frost (1969)
Barbara Guest The Confetti Trees (1999)
Allen Ginsberg Howl (1956)
Lyn Hejinian My Life (1987)
Langston Hughes Selected Poems (1987)
Robinson Jeffers Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems (1965)
Louise Gluck The Wild Iris (1993)
Kenneth Koch Collected Poems (2005)
Yusef Komunyakaa The Pleasure Dome (2004)
Robert Lowell Life Studies (1959)
Marianne Moore The Complete Poems (2003)
Alice Notley Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005
Frank O’Hara The Collected Poetry of Frank O’Hara (1995)
Sharon Olds Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002
George Oppen Collected Poems (1975)
Sylvia Plath Ariel (1965)
Adrienne Rich An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)
Kay Ryan Elephant Rocks (1996)
William Stafford The Way It Is (1998)
Gertrude Stein Tender Buttons (1914)
Wallace Stevens Collected Poems (1954)
W. C. Williams Spring and All (1923)

Fiction:
Paul Auster City of Glass (graphic novel with David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik (1994)
Saul Bellow Herzog (1964)
Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
The Professor’s House (1925)
Don DeLillo White Noise (1985)
Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1953)
William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Absalom, Absalom (1936)
Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Jack Kerouac On The Road (1937)
Nella Larsen Passing (1929)
Maxine Hong Kingston Woman Warrior (1971)
Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Carson McCullers A Member of the Wedding (1946)
Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
Vladimir Nabokov Lolita
Pale Fire (1962)
Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar (1971)
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Philip Roth Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
Art Spiegelman The Complete Maus (1992)
Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five; or, The Children's Crusade (1969)
Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday (1973)
Hocus Pocus (1990)
Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest (1996)
Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920)

Drama:
Edward Albee Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)
Susan Glaspell Trifles (1917)
Loraine Hansberry A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Arthur Miller The Death of a Salesman (1949)
Eugene O’Neill Long Day’s Journey Into the Night (1956)
Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie (1945)
August Wilson Fences (1985)

Non-fiction/Criticism
Christopher Beach The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century Poetry
Malcolm Bradbury The Modern American Novel
James Breslin From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965 (1985)
Judith Butler Gender Trouble (1990)
Louise Gluck Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994)
Lyn Hejinian The Language of Inquiry (2000)
Marjorie Perloff The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1999)
Adrienne Rich Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)
Poetry and Commitment: An Essay (2007)
Susan Rosenbaum Professing Sincerity (2007)
Susan Stewart On Longing (1993)
Lionel Trilling Sincerity and Authenticity (1970)


20th Century British Literature
Caroline Ramsey
Committee Member: Dr. Adam Parkes

Poetry:
W.H. Auden Selected Poems (1979)
Louise Bennett “Jamaican Language,” “Dry-Foot Bwoy,” “Colonization in Reverse,” “Jamaican Omen” (1966)
Basil Bunting Briggflatts (1965)
Donald Davies Collected Poems (1991)
Carol Ann Duffy Selected Poems (2009)
T.S. Eliot Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
The Waste Land (1922)
Ash Wednesday (1930)
Four Quartets (1943)
William Empson Collected Poems (1930-1976)
Roy Fisher City (1962)
Robert Graves Collected Poems (1914-1947)
W. S. Graham The Nightfishing (1955)
Thom Gunn Collected Poems (1994)
Thomas Hardy Collected Poems (1919)
Seamus Heaney Death of a Naturalist (1966)
Opened Ground: Poems, 1966-1996 (1998)
Geoffrey Hill Mercian Hymns (1971)
“An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England”
Ted Hughes Collected Poems (2003)
Philip Larkin Collected Poems (1988)
Mina Loy The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996)
Derek Mahon Selected Poems (2001)
Paul Muldoon New Selected Poems: 1968-1994 (1996)
Wilfred Owen "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Dulce Et Decorum Est", "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" and "Strange Meeting
Ezra Pound Canzoni (1911)
Ripostes (1912)
A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930)
A.K. Ramanujan “Self Portrait,” “Elements of Composition”
Isaac Rosenberg Selections from Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Carol Rumens Selected Poems (1968-2004)
Stevie Smith Selected Poems (1962)
Penelop Shuttle Selected Poems (1998)
Dylan Thomas Collected Poems, 1934-1952
Derek Walcott Selected Poems (2007)
W.B. Yeats Collected Poems (1933)

Fiction:
Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim (1954)
Julian Barnes Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
Samuel Beckett Watt (1953)
Molloy (1955)
John Berger To the Wedding (1995)
Elizabeth Bowen The Last September (1929)
Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1902)
Nostromo (1904)
The Secret Agent (1907)
E.M. Forster Howards End (1910)
A Passage To India (1924)
Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
Christopher Isherwood Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day (1989)
Henry James The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
James Joyce Dubliners (1914)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Ulysses (1922)
Finnegans Wake (1939)
D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913)
The Rainbow (1915)
Women in Love (1921)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
Doris Lessing “To Room Nineteen” (1963)
Wyndham Lewis Tarr (1918)
Mina Loy Insel (1991)
Ian McEwan Amsterdam (1998)
Iris Murdoch Under the Net (1954)
V. S. Naipaul A House For Mr. Bizwas (1961)
A Bend in the River (1979)
George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)
A Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)
Samuel Selvan The Lonely Londoners (1956)
Alan Sillitoe Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
Evelyn Waugh Decline and Fall (1928)
A Handful of Dust (1934)
Virginia Woolf Jacob’s Room (1922)
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
To The Lighthouse (1927)
Orlando (1928)
The Waves (1931)
Between the Acts (1941)

Drama:
Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot (1952)
Endgame (1957)
Harold Pinter The Birthday Party (1958)
The Homecoming (1965)
George Bernard Shaw Heartbreak House (1919)
Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966)
The Real Inspector Hound (1968)
Travesties (1974)
John Synge Playboy of the Western World (1907)
W.B. Yeats Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902)
On Baile’s Strand (1903)

Non-Fictional Prose:
W. H. Auden The Dyer’s Hand (1962)
Elizabeth Bowen Collected Impressions (1950)
Joseph Conrad preface to The Nigger of Narcissus (1897)
Henry James preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1907)
preface to The Golden Bowl (1909)
T.S. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917)
“The Metaphysical Poets” (1921)
“Ulysses, Order and Myth” (1923)
“The Function of Criticism” (1923)
William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity
Ford Madox Ford “On Impressionism” (1924)
Samuel Hynes The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1998)
D. H. Lawrence selected essays from Phoenix (1936):
“Art and Morality”
“Surgery for the Novel—Or a Bomb”
“Why the Novel Matters”
“Morality and the Novel”
“Pornography and Obscenity”
Mina Loy Feminist Manifesto (1914)
Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own (1929)
The Common Reader (1925)
The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)
W.B. Yeats “The Symbolism of Poetry” (1900)
A Vision (1937)
Mythologies (1959)

Criticism:
Timothy Clark Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (2001)
Donald Davie Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973)
Rita Felski The Gender of Modernity (1995)
Paul Fussell The Great War and Modern Memory (1977)
Samuel Hynes The Auden Generation (1976)
Hugh Kenner The Pound Era (1971)
Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (1988)
Michael Levenson A Genealogy of Modernism (1984)
The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (1999)
F. R. Leavis The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (1962)
Jeffrey Perl The Tradition of Return (1984)
Michael North Reading 1922 (1999)
Camera Works (2005)
Victor Sherry The Great War and The Language of Modernism (2004)

Victorian Literature (not yet finalized):

Poetry:
Matthew Arnold “Shakespeare”
“To Marguerite–Contined”
“The Buried Life”
“The Scholar-Gipsy”
“Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse”
“Thyrsis”
“Dover Beach”
Emily Bronte “The night is darkening around me”
“The Night Wind”
“To Imagination”
“Plead for Me”
“Remembrance”
“Death”
“Stars”
“The Prisoner”
“No coward soul is mine”
“I’m happiest when most away”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning “Bertha in the Lane”
“Cry of the Children”
“A Curse for a Nation”
“Felicia Hemans”
“Grief”
“Mother and Poet”
“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”
Sonnets from the Portuguese
Aurora Leigh
Robert Browning “Porphyria’s Lover”
“My Last Duchess”
“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”
“Love Among the Ruins”
“A Woman’s Last Word”
“Fra Lippo Lippi”
“A Toccata of Galuppi’s”
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
“How it Strikes a Contemporary”
“Andrea Del Sarto”
“One Word More”
“Caliban Upon Setebos”
“Why I Am a Liberal”
Edward Fitzgerald “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”
Thomas Hardy “Hap”
“Drummer Hodge”
“The Darkling Thrush”
Felicia Hemans “Casabianca”*
Thomas Hood “Song of the Shirt”
Gerard Manley Hopkins “The Habit of Perfection”
“Spring”
“God’s Grandeur”
“The Windhover”
“Pied Beauty”
“Spring and Fall”
A.E. Housman A Shropshire Lad (Selections from Mermin and Tucker*)
Rudyard Kipling “The Ballad of East and West”
“Mandalay”
“Tommy”
“The Widow at Windsor”
“Recessional”
“The White Man’s Burden”
Amy Levy “Xantippe”
“London in July”
“Felo de Se”
“Magdalen”
“A Farewell”
“On the Threshold”
“A Reminiscence”
William Morris “The Defense of Guenevere”
Coventry Patmore The Angel in the House (Excerpts from Mermin and Tucker*)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti “My Blessed Damozel”
“Jenny”
The Hosue of Life (Selections from Mermin and Tucker*)
Christina Rossetti “In an Artist’s Studio”
“A Birthday”
“Up-Hill”
“Goblin Market”
“A Triad”
“Remember”
“After Death”
“The Hour and the Ghost”
“Echo”
“Winter: My Secret”
“The Convent Threshold”
“Memory”
“The Lowest Place”
“A Pause”
Algernon Swinburne “The Leper”
“Hymn to Proserpine”
“Hermaphroditus”
“The Garden of Proserpine”
“Ave ateque Vale”
“A Forsaken Garden”
“Poeta Loquitur”

Alfred Tennyson “Marianna”
“The Lady of Shalott”
“The Palace of Art”
“The Kraken”
“The Lotos-Eaters”
“St. Simon Stylites”
“Ulysses”
“Morte d’Artur”
“Locksley Hall”
In Memoriam A.H.H.
“The Charge of the Light Brigade”
“Maud: A Monodrama”
“Enoch Arden”
Augusta Webster “A Castaway”
Oscar Wilde “Impression du Matin”
“The Harlots House”
“Symphony in Yellow”
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

Fiction:
Anne Bronte Agnes Grey
Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre
Villette
Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
Charles Dickens Bleak House
Oliver Twist
A Tale of Two Cities
George Eliot Middlemarch
Daniel Deronda
Henry James The Portrait of a Lady
Daisy Miller
The Great Good Place
The Turn of the Screw
Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure
Rudyard Kipling Kim
Margaret Oliphant Miss Marjoribanks
Bram Stoker Dracula
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray



Drama:
Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest
Others by Wilde?*

Non-Fiction:
Matthew Arnold “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
Preface to Poems, 1853
The Study of Poetry (Excerpt from Mermin and Tucker*)
Thomas Carlyle Sartor Restartus*
“The Gospel of Mammonism”
“Happy”
Kathleen Cuffe “A Reply from the Daughters”
B.A. Crackenthorpe “The Revolt of the Daughters”
Isabella Beeton The Book of Household Management*
Sarah Stickney Ellis The Women of England (Selection from Mermin and Tucker)*
Sarah Grand “A New Aspect of the Woman Question”
Fanny Kemble Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (Excerpts*)
J.S. Mill “What is Poetry?”
On Liberty (Excerpts*)
Eliza Lynn Linton “The Girl of the Period”
Harriet Martineau Autobiography (Excerpts*)
William Morris “The Art of the People”
“How I Became a Socialist”
Florence Nightengale Cassandra
Ouida “The New Woman”
Walter Pater The Renaissance (Excerpts*)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti “The Stealthy School of Poetry” (Excerpt from Mermin and Tucker*)
John Ruskin Modern Painters (Excerpts*)
The Nature of Gothic (from Mermin and Tucker*)
Praeterita (Excerpts*)
The Stones of Venice (Excerpts*)
Mary Seacole The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands
Oscar Wilde “The Decay of Lying”

* I’ve asterisked writers or works that I’m uncertain about. In most cases, I’m unsure of what would be appropriate to include (selections, excerpts) or what other works I might be missing that would benefit my list.

My "Huge Ribbon-cutting Ceremony"

After this morning's meeting with Dr. Parkes, I decided to create a blog to record my preparatory notes for my comprehensive exams. My lists: 20th c. American Literature, 20th c. British Literature, and Victorian Literature. (Actual list post to follow.)

I intend for this blog to organize my thoughts/ideas/arguments in a public forum to which colleagues, friends, and strangers can contribute. It seems like a helpful way to get discussion and feedback efficaciously and conveniently. Plus, hopefully people will inspire me to keep it interesting and creative, and additionally call me out if I fall behind schedule. I'll appreciate any help I can get from literarians on the web.

So here I sit, in half-lotus at my kitchen table, poised to bare my book-loving brain for the world wide web... The big question, as always: To publish?