English 490
Spring 2000
Stubbs 254
Hours: 5:30 T 9:30-11 TWTH

Course Description:

Texts:

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. eds., Preminger et al.
Postmodern American Poetry. ed., Paul Hoover.
New American Poets of the ‘90s. eds., Myers and Weingarten.

Requirements:

* Roundtable discussions of assigned textual and outside readings, and of class members' poems in working drafts, with written critiques.

* Writing, revising and finishing(?) a minimum of ten poems.

* One conference.

* Submission to Helicon.

* Sponsorship of one literary magazine to be kept in Helicon Rm.

Grading:

F--Anything less than C.
C--All assignments completed adequately.
B--All assignments completed throroughly and thoughtfully.
A--All assignments completed with excellence.

English 490 is a class in the reading and writing of "literary" poetry, with emphasis on voice, style, and vision, and although we will read extensively in the one outside text I've assigned this semester, our primary text for the course is your own work. To avoid chaos, I'll want you to present your typed, xeroxed copies to the class one week before they are to be discussed. I will expect you to be close and constructive readers of each other's work. Your individual response is important.

Kinds of Images

Uprose, uprose, the stone fields uprose.
--Roethke

A ball will bounce but less and less.
--Wilbur

This lizard who is all lizards
snaps flies from a flat back of black rock.
--Ransom

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
into blossom.
--Wright

A butterfly lights on the branch
of your green voice.
--Wright

Two athletes
are dancing in the cathedral
of the wind.
--Wright

Long boats
with the names of winds
set sail
in the sea of his blind eye.
--Levine

Hair is heaven's water flowing over us.
Often a woman drifts off down her long hair and is lost.
--Knott

Selected Poems for Discussion

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewher to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden

 

 

Meditation at Langunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkin-seed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is a numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Robert Hass