1. Emily Dickinson, "I dwell in Possibility"

We begin with Emily Dickinson's "I dwell in Possibility." As you read, keep in mind that Emily's poems call out for multiple readings. There are always four or five things happening at once. Here you'll want to try to understand what kind of house is the house of her writing.

1. read the poem: link to the text
2. listen to Al Filreis recite the poem: link to audio
3. watch a 20-minute discussion of the poem: link to video

2. William Carlos Williams, "Between Walls"

 

William Carlos Williams was a medical doctor - a pediatrician. You went to his home office for consults, or he did house calls. He was also affiliated with a hospital, and regularly "did rounds" there. This poem, "Between Walls," describes what he observed while looking out from a back wing of the hospital. The poem was written under the sway of "imagism," a modernist mode that called for radical condensation, precision, and visuality.

1. read the poem: link to text

2. listen to Williams perform the poem: link to PennSound

3. read/listen to a text-audio alignment of the poem: link to PennSound

4. listen to a 25-minute discussion of the poem: link to PoemTalk

5. watch a 10-minute discussion of the poem: link to video

3. H.D., "Sea Rose"

Hilda Doolittle, or "H.D.," was an imagist, just as Williams was when he wrote "Between Walls." Perhaps you can say that H.D. was a purer and more assiduous imagist than Williams. Poems such as "Sea Rose" sought to make language over from scratch, to find new sharp words to represent common things. No cliches! No tired old sentimental roses of love. Here we have a different rose altogether. So what is the poem saying about the rose? What is the poem saying about the tradition of poems about roses that were meant to be about love?

1. read the poem: link to text
2. watch a 21-minute discussion of the poem: link to video

4. Lorine Niedecker, "Grandfather advised me"

Lorine Niedecker was tough and independent. She spent a good part of her life living on her own in rural Wisconsin. In this poem the speaker responds to her grandfather's advice that she learn a skill or "trade," because, presumably, that's the only way one can get and have a good job. Lorine, poet to the end, has a different idea of vocation.

1. read the poem: link to text
2. watch a 14-minute discussion of the poem: link to video

5. Cid Corman, "It isnt for want"

Cid Corman wrote thousands of short poems like this one. Not all of them are as striking and pointed as this one, but they really were written in much the same vein. As you read this, try to understand who "you" is. What does it mean to stay in a poem? What does it mean to be detained as you read? When you're "done" with a poem, what happens to the poet?

1. read the poem: link to text
2. listen to Corman performing the poem: link to PennSound
3. watch a 14-minute discussion of the poem: link to video

6. Gertrude Stein, "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso"

The image above shows a portion of a portrait of Gertrude Stein painted by Pablo Picasso. They were friends. Each thought he/she was a genius. Stein admired Picasso's cubist mode of painting, so she thought she'd try to write a cubist portrait of Picasso - to do with pen and words what Picasso was doing with brush and paint.

1. read the poem (along with Ulla Dydo's comment): link to text
2. listen to Stein perform the poem: link to PennSound
3. read/listen to a text-audio alignment: link to PennSound
4. listen to critic Marjorie Perloff talk about Stein's verbal portrait: link to audio
5. watch video of dance choreographed to Stein's "If I Told Him": link to YouTube
6. watch a 20-minute discussion of Stein's poem: link to video

7. Claude McKay, "If We Must Die"

Claude McKay wrote a poem of revolutionary content, "If We Must Die." The poem calls for counter-violence as a response to violence. Does the form of the poem - it's a traditional sonnet - enhance or possibly detract from the poem's message? Think about the relationship between form and content. Can form say something? It can. Poems say what they say through the form the poet chooses for them. What does this poem's form say?

1. read the poem: link to text
2. listen to McKay perform the poem: link to audio
3. read a passage from Melvin Tolson's review of the poem: link to text
4. watch a 19-minute discussion of the poem: link to video

8. Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

Most of the poems in this grouping of 15 poems participate in the modernist/postmodernist mode. Depending on how you interpret McKay's use of form (the traditional sonnet), you might say that McKay stands outside those movements. In any case, Frost does stand outside: he had an antagonistic relationship to modernist experiment. He claimed that writing free verse (such as Williams in "Between Walls" or H.D. in "Sea Rose") was like playing tennis without a net.  We are reading one of Frost's most famous poems, "Mending Wall." If you have time, watch the one-hour debate held at the Kelly Writers House in the fall of 2012: there two poets admire what Frost is doing in "Mending Wall," while two others - the postmodernist poets on the panel - have serious doubts about the poem. Which side are you on?

1. read the poem: link to text
2. listen to Frost perform the poem: link to audio
3. watch a 19-minute discussion of the poem: link to video
4. watch a 1-hour debate about the poem among 4 poets: link to video

9. Robert Creeley, "I Know a Man"

In this poem we seem to have a conversation between two people. The speaker is apparently the driver and another person - a man not named "John" - who is apparently a passenger in the car. Why does the passenger rebuke the speaker-driver at the end? What is the speaker-driver ("I") afraid of? If you've read one of the Beat Generation novels of driving - for instance Kerouac's On the Road - compare the speaker-driver here to the transcontinentally wandering beats in their cars. Is it possible that Creeley's poem is a rejoinder to the beat aesthetic of driving-for-the-sake-of-driving?

1. read the poem: link to text
2. listen to five PennSound recordings of Creeley performing the poem: link to PennSound
3. read/listen with text-audio alignment of the poem: link to PennSound
4. listen to three poets discuss the poem in a 30-minute podcast: link to PoemTalk
5.  watch a 14-minute discussion of the poem: link to video

10. Frank O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died"

 

Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died" is an elegy. But its approach to the deceased person being memorialized is quite different from that of traditional elegies. What are the differences? What happened during O'Hara's "day"? Why does he use the present tense?  O'Hara is deemed a key member of the so-called "New York School" of poets, and he is thought of as having mastered a style called "I do this I do that." Give this poem, what might that phrase mean?

"Lady" was, of course, Billie Holiday.

1. read the poem: link to text
2. watch a 20-minute discussion of the poem: link to video

11. Bob Perelman, "Chronic Meanings"

Bob Perelman's poem consisting of 5-word lines was written as a pre-elegy for the poet and editor Leland Hickman, who had recently received a fatal diagnosis of AIDS. What sort of elegaic poem is this? What effect is created by the formal constraint Perelman imposes upon himself.

1. read the poem: link to text
2. read Perelman's commentary on the poem: link to text
3. listen to Perelman's commentary on the poem: link to audio
4. listen to Perelman perform the poem: link to PennSound
5. watch a 21-minute discussion of the poem: link to video

12. Rae Armantrout, "The Way"

 

Rae Armantrout has been called the Emily Dickinson of our time. "The Way" is typical of Armantrout's style: succinct, dense, full of multivalent words, non-narrative, open-ended. The first lines of the poem consist of overheard phrases, but the "I" that begins the final eight lines seems to be the poet herself. What do those final lines have to say about the way we, as children, first learn to hear stories, and why might a child recall this as an abandonment?

1. read the poem: link to text

2. listen to Armantrout perform the poem: link to PennSound audio

3. listen to three poets in a 30-minute discussion of the poem: link to PoemTalk

13. Caroline Bergvall, "VIA"

 

Caroline Bergvall has made a poem out of forty-seven English translations of the opening tercet (three-line verse) of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1321): “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita.” She arranges the translations alphabetically according to first word, from “along” to “when,” reciting the translator’s name and date after each. She performs the poem and the effect is eerie and beautiful and repetitive - as if we as listeners/readers are going nowhere.

1. read Bergvall's poem: link to text

2. listen to Bergvall perform the poem: link to PennSound

3. read Brian Reed's essay on the poem: link to text

4. listen to three poems talk for 30-minutes about the poem: link to PoemTalk

5. watch a 12-minute discussion of the poem: link to video

14. Jena Osman, "Dropping Leaflets"

Jena Osman wrote this poem not long after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. She was frustrated by the seeming meaninglessness of the statements made by administration officials during press conferences and as quoted in newspaper articles. So she "read the transcripts [of the press conferences, and the newspaper articles], printed them out, ... tore them up, and then I stood on a chair, and then I bombed my office floor with them as if they were leaflets and the leaflets told me what to do." "Dropping Leaflets" is thus a randomly assembled collage poem.

1. read the poem: link to text 
2. listen to Osman perform the poem: link to PennSound
3. listen to three poets discuss this poem for 30 minutes: link to PoemTalk
4. watch a 12-minute discussion of this poem: link to video

15. Tracie Morris, "Afrika"

 

Tracie Morris is a musical poet. For this project - called "Afrika" - she "sampled" a single conventional sentence from the African American narrative. She then transformed this sentence into a chanted poem in which its words and sounds are jumbled, stuttered, repeated and torn apart. What is the connection between the form of this sound-poem and the semantic meaning of the sentence on which it is based?

1. listen to Tracie Morris introduce and then perform the poem: link to PennSound

2. watch Morris perform the poem: link to video

3. listen to a musical arrangement of "Afrika" with Val Jeanty: link to PennSound
4. watch a 25-minute discussion of the poem: link to video