The seminar will encourage students to engage critically with a selection of literary and critical work by a number of innovative British, American and Commonwealth poets working in the latter twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Bob Cobbing, Charles Olson, Denise Riley, Aime Caesair, Robert Creeley, J.H. Prynne, Frank O´Hara, John Ashbery, Geraldine Monk, Amiri Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Steve McCaffery, Alice Notley, Allen Fisher, Ted Berrigan, Barbara Guest, John Tranter, Lyn Hejinian, Marjorie Welish, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Andrea Bradey, Keston Sutherland, Maggie O'Sullivan, Clark Coolidge, Caroline Bergvall, Johanna Drucker, Gig Ryan, John Kinsella, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Susan Howe, Johanna Drucker, David Antin, Rosaire Appel & others.
*Assessment will be based upon: attendance (max. absences: 2); a 3000 word research paper focused upon the work of one or more of the poets (or upon a topic) discussed during the seminar), within a critical theoretical framework (due 10 June); 3 x 300-word reports; in-class presentation (slideshow).
Schedule
18.2 Intro
25.2 Black Mountain
Reading: Charles Olson, "Projective Verse" (1950)
https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Projective_Verse.pdf
4.3 Beat
Reading: Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" (1955)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
11.3 The New American Poetry
Reading: Frank O'Hara, "Personism: A Manifesto" (1959)
https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/OHara_Personism.pdf
18.3 British Poetry Revival
Reading: Bob Cobbing, “Some Statements on Sound Poetry” (1969)
https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/cobbing/
25.3 Fluxus
Reading: George Maciunas, "Fluxus Manifesto" 1960)
Texts: https://monoskop.org/Fluxus
1.4 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Reading: Geoff Ward, "Language Poetry & the American Avant-garde" (1993)
https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Ward-Geoffrey_Language-Poetry.html
8.4 Concrete / Digital / Conceptual
Reading: Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry" (1958)
https://udallas-ir.tdl.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/7216b37e-cfb5-48ea-9afc-ce6426603cbd/content
Texts: https://monoskop.org/Concrete_poetry
15.4 Asemic
Texts: https://ia801403.us.archive.org/6/items/df9bf011-efaf-49a7-9497-2a4d4cfde9e8/df9bf011-efaf-49a7-9497-2a4d4cfde9e8.pdf
Activities: https://asemicwanderings.com/Anarchic-Writing
22.4 Report 1:
Donald Theall, "The Avant-Garde & the Wake of Radical Modernism"
29.4 Report 2:
Marjorie Perloff, "After Language Poetry: Innovation & it's Theoretical Discontents"
6.5 Report 3:
Marjorie Perloff, "Screening the Page / Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics & the Differential Text"
13.5 20-minute presentation:
On the work of one or several poets (overview of poetics + discussion of selected poetic text/s).
TWO CASE STUDIES: DENISE RILEY / AIME CESAIRE
1. DENISE RILEY
Marxism for Infants (1977)
https://www.scribd.com/document/354711712/riley-denise-marxism-for-infants-1977-pdf
Denise Riley, “Bad Words” (Diacritics, 2001)
https://victorianpersistence.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/denise-riley-bad-words.pdf
Denise Riley, recordings
https://www.newwriting.net/2016/09/say-something-back/
Andrea Brady, “Echo, Irony and Repetition in the Writings of Denise Riley”
https://www.academia.edu/11567427/_Echo_Irony_and_Repetition_in_the_Writings_of_Denise_Riley_
Daniel Hartley, “Dedramatising ideology: style, interpellation and impersonality in Denise Riley”
file:///C:/Users/FF%20UK/Downloads/33837VoR.pdf
Aaron Deveson, “Affect in the Writing of Denise Riley”
http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/issues/Affect/7.pdf
Helen Charman, “Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley”
https://www.thewhitereview.org/reviews/where-do-i-put-myself-if-public-lifes-destroyed-on-reading-denise-riley/
Denise Riley: Interview (PNR 1995)
https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=1912
David Kennedy, review of UNDOING THE WORK: DENISE RILEY, Selected Poems
https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=1008
Review of Denise Riley, Lurex
https://woodbeepoet.com/2022/05/30/dark-yet-sparkly-denise-riley-lurex-and-the-flesh-of-words/
AIME CESAIRE
(Negritude/Poetics of Anticolonialism)
AIME CESAIRE--NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO A NATIVE LAND
https://kboo.fm/sites/default/files/AIME%20CESAIRE--NOTEBOOK%20OF%20A%20RETURN%20TO%20A%20NATIVE%20LAND.pdf
Aime Cesaire, "Discourse on Colonialism" (1950)
https://archive.org/stream/DiscourseOnColonialismAimeCesaire/Discourse%20on%20colonialism%20-%20Aime%20Cesaire_djvu.txt
Aime Cesaire, "Discours sur la Négritude" (1987)
http://blog.ac-versailles.fr/1erelnerval/public/LA_2_Cesaire__Discours_sur_la_Negritude.pdf
Sylvia Wynter, "A Different Creature"
https://monoskop.org/images/f/f1/Wynter_Sylvia_2001_A_Different_Kind_of_Creature.pdf
Mark W. Westmoreland, "Césaire’s Revolution of Pedagogy"
https://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_23/westmoreland_december2018.pdf
Recommended reading
Louis Armand (ed.), Contemporary Poetics (Evanston: Northwest University Press, 2007): https://www.academia.edu/63426481/CONTEMPORARY_POETICS_edited_by_Louis_Armand
Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry (1960)
Donald Allen & Warren Tallman (eds.), The Poetics of the New American Poetry (New York: Grove, 1973)
Gillian Allnutt, Fred D'Aguiar, Ken Edwards and Eric Mottram (eds.), The New British Poetry 1968-88 (1988)
Ron Silliman (ed.), In the American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1986)
Iain Sinclair (ed.), Conductors of Chaos (Picador, 1996)
Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999)
Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (eds.), Poems for the Millennium (2 vols; University of California Press)
Paul Hoover (ed), Postmodern American Poetry (WW Norton, 1994)
Louis Armand (ed.), Avant-Post (Litteraria Pragensia, 2006) https://litterariapragensia.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/avant-post/
Louis Armand (ed), Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics (Litteraria Pragensia, 2010) https://litterariapragensia.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/hidden-agendas/
David & Christine Kennedy (eds), Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time and Locale (Liverpool UP, 2013)
Alex Balgiu & Mónica de la Torre (eds), Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 (Primary Information, 2020)
Peter Schwenger, Asemic: The Art of Writing (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)
Jerome McGann, Postmodern Poetries (1990)
Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: imaginary cinemas in French poetry (Fordham University Press, 2013)
Michael Golston, Poetic machinations: allegory, surrealism, and postmodern poetic form (Columbia University Press, 2015)
Matt Theado (ed) The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry (2021)
Robert Bailey, Art & Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds (Duke University Press, 2016)
Andrea Andersson, PostScript: Writing After Conceptual Art (University of Toronto Press, 2018)
Christopher Funkhouser & Sandy Baldwin, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms (University Alabama Press, 2007)
John Kinsella, Polysituatedness: A Poetics of Displacement (Manchester University Press, 2017)
Nicholas Thoburn, Anti-book: on the art and politics of radical publishing (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)
Eduardo Ledesma, Radical Poetry: Aesthetics, Politics, Technology, and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes (2015)
Kathleen Fraser, Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity (University of Alabama Press, 2000)
Silverberg Mark, The New York School poets and the neo-avant-garde (2010)
David W. Huntsperger, Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry: Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, Hejinian (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
International Poetry Incarnation, Royal Albert Hall, 1965 (dir. Peter Whitehead)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIRWSlDR9KI
Poslední úprava: Armand Louis, Ph.D. (18.02.2025)
