Week Two 10/18: vowels and consonants and letters: why are they important?

• In-class performance collaboration of sound poems
• Synaesthesia and you: what colors are your letters?
• Homework: Constellation poems and a trip to the Metropolitan Museum

10/25: Metropolitan Museum Visit Week. No meeting at the Poetry Project.

Week Three: 11/1: syllables

• Olson’s Projective Verse
• syllable as primary unit or frame (hear Brakhage interview w/C. Luna)
• view section of Brakhage Dog Star Man for example of frame as syllable
• hand out: Kristeva on Egyptian writing
• Homework: poem with one syllable words

Week Four:11/8: syllables across cultures

• discussion of Kristeva and Sanders on Egyptian writing
• the syllable as measure— transcribe syllable counts in your work and in the poems of others. look for patterns.

Week Five: 11/15: from syllables to words

• discussion of syllable poems and transcriptions of poems by syllable
• continued discussion of Kristeva— hieroglyphs and cunieform
• view Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon— utterance and myth and “Imagism” (cross-reference Jane Harrison’s writing on the Greeks) [Note re: viewing of Maya Deren: Olson says “It is a matter, finally, of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used.”]
• in-class work—”one’s own language”— creating a system of signs

Week Six: 11/22: words and etymologies

• look at Emily Dickinson and at H.D.— metrics, phonetics, etymologies, and symbol use— how do they posit the objects the way they do and why?
• Pay attention to capitalization and naming (spell casting)
• assignment: tracing etymologies— re-translate one of your own poems backwards through time — tracing word origins, relations to other languages, etc.

Week Seven 11/29: words and symbols

• discussion of etymology poems
• view Kenneth Anger film— Fireworks— and Harry Smith Early Abstractions
• look at the use of words and symbols in Hannah Weiner’s work
• assignment: read opening of Saussere’s work on the signifier and signified In A Course in General Linguistics
• assignment: mistranslation of O’Hara poem (compare his use of naming to H.D.’s)
• suggested reading: Robert Grenier’s “On Speech” [from In the American Tree]

Week Eight: 12/6: from words to “sentences” (series, sets, and silence)

• “Lower level speech, upper level music.” —Louis Zukofsky
• discussion of O’Hara mistranslation
• in-class work— discussion of sets in Emily Dickinson’s work— listen to Duncan lecture on Dickinson’s work
• view part of Brakhage’s Dog Star Man for understanding of series and sets
• discussion of John Cage and Igor Stravinsky (suggested reading: Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music)
• assignment— find three frequently used words or concepts in your poem and research them.

Week Nine: 12/13: rhyme and meter- iambs and trochees

• discussion of symbol/word/concept clusters in your poems assignment: a phonetic and Metrical evaluation of Clark Coolidge’s work alongside the work of Alexander Pope.
• assignment— iambic pentameter poem (14 lines)

Week Ten 12/20: more meter— dactyls and anapests

• discussion of metrical writing and iambic pentameter assignment
• assignment— dactyllic hexameter poem (10 lines)
• suggested reading: David Baker’s Meter in English: A Critical Engagement
• hear ancient greek syllable renderings in Ed Sanders songs

Links:

Ubu Web

Poetry Project

Email me at ljarnot@gmail.com