ELIT 48C Class #20

Stationary vs. Stationery

• Stationary means "fixed in place, unable to move;” Stationery is letterhead or other special writing paper. (Hint: Stationery with an e comes with an envelope.) Examples: Evan worked out on his stationary bike. The duke's initials and crest appeared atop his personal stationery.

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sue-sommer/common-grammar mistakes_b_935609.html#s338543&title=stationarystationery

AGENDA

The Chair Poet Imagist Poetry

o “In a Station of the Metro.”o “The Red Wheelbarrow” o “To Elsie”

Author Introduction:o Wallace Stevenso Mina Loy

Chair Poet of the Day?

On the website, you will find a link to short American poems. You can get a poem from there, but any American poem is fine. Simply commit the poem to memory; each day from now until the end of the quarter I will ask if we have a chair poet. All you have to do is raise your hand. I will take one or two a day. (If there are multiple volunteers, we will schedule them for the next sessions.

A chair poet earns five extra participation points for each member of his or her group.

• The first time I taught this class, a student spontaneously recited “The Red Wheelbarrow” while standing on a chair. From that came the idea of a chair poet a day.

LECTURE

Imagism

Crooked, crawling tide with long wet fingersClutching at the gritty beach in the roar and spurt of spray,Tide of gales, drunken tide, lava-burst of breakers,Black ships plunge upon you from sea to sea away.

From “Tide of Storms” by John Gould Fletcher

Imagism flourished in Britain and in the United States for a brief period between 1909 and 1917. In an effort to move away from the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century Victorian poetry, imagist poets looked to many sources stimulate new ideas:

• They studied the French symbolists, who were experimenting with free verse, a form of poetry that shunned the accustomed rhythm of metrical feet, or lines. Rules of rhyming were also considered nonessential.

• The ancient form of Japanese haiku poetry influenced the imagists to focus on one simple image.

• Greek and Roman classical poetry inspired some of the imagists to strive for a high quality of writing that would endure.

T. E. Hulme (an English Poet who lived from 1883–1917) was instrumental in formulating and cultivating the ideas and concepts that characterized imagism. Hulme proposed a poetry based on absolutely accurate presentation of its subject with no excess verbiage.

Imagist poetry aimed to replace muddy abstractions with exactness of observed detail, apt metaphors, and economy of language.

The first tenet of the Imagist manifesto was "To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word." While Hulme wrote only a modest amount of poetry, his ideas inspired Ezra Pound.

Pound's definition of the image was "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Pound defined the tenets of Imagist poetry as follows:

I. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.

II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

I. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5658#sthash.D8754249.dpuf

Amy Lowell on ImagismWhen Ezra Pound left the imagists, Amy Lowell led the movement. In her book Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Macmillan Company, 1917), she outlines what she sees as the major points of imagism. She set them down “in order.”

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.

2. To create new rhythms -as the expression of new moods -- and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon "free-verse" as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry a new cadence means a new idea.

3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly of aeroplanes and automobiles, nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modem life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 19 11.

4. To present an image (hence the name: "Imagist"). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.

5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.

6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/amylowell/imagism.htm

American ImagistsEzra PoundH.DAmy LowellJohn Gould FletcherWilliam Carlos Williams

English ImagistsRichard AldingtonJames JoyceF. S. FlintD. H. Lawrence

It is almost impossible to discuss the imagist movement in terms of only Americans. Pound, who spearheaded much of it, had connections in both America and Britain, and the ideas influenced all of those poets in the same decade.

Though the Imagism movement was over by 1917, the doctrine profoundly influenced the free verse style of the twentieth century.

GROUP DISCUSSION:PARAPHRASENEW CRITICISMQHQS

“In a Station of the Metro”

“The Red Wheelbarrow”

“To Elsie”

In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.

Who can paraphrase “In a

Station of the Metro”?

New critical readings of “In a Station of the Metro”

1. In the first line, the word “apparition” means either a ghost/ghost-like people or something becoming visible. Throw in the “faces in a crowd” and Pound at/on a train, he could be perceiving the sea of faces so quickly that it seems as if they appear out of thin air as ghosts. It’s also possible that he’s implying everyone on the train/platform looks melancholy or depressed thereby making them look dead. This in tandem with their quickly appearing faces may give off a ghostly vibe. These “ghosts” may look dead due to the mundane acts of life—no vitality for life because everyone is tired of the same thing day in and day out.

2. The speaker sits in a station of the Metro and observes people’s faces. Most faces are grim which collectively look like ghosts, but there are few faces that stand out. They must be some attractive women’s faces because beautiful women are often compared to flower petals. In other words, “petals” are metaphoric to the faces of attractive women. And the “wet, black bough” is a metaphor of sexy moist hair that serves as a background to emphasize the women’s attractive faces. This discovery brings the speaker into the world of fantasy from a routine busy morning.

QHQ on “In a Station of the Metro”

1. Q: Why is the poem so short?

2. Q: Why is it important that Pound is using metaphors rather than similes?

3. Q: Why does Pound choose to focus on only one simple image rather than further developing the imagery?

4. Q: Is there a relationship between “petals” and “apparitions” and how does it connect to an overall symbol of the passing of death?

5. Q: Could “In a Station of the Metro” be a representation of the dying human connection to the world?

6. Q: Is this poem discussing the conflict between spirituality and science?

7. Q: How is human individuality portrayed in the Pound’s poem?

William Carlos Williams“No ideas but in things”

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much dependsupon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqIl3oX_44s

The Paraphrase!

1. An enormous amount of an ambiguous item, substance, idea, etc. is reliant on a brick-colored farm tool used to roll around heavy loads. This tool, a red wheelbarrow, sits next to egg-colored (no pun intended?) hens and roosters. The wheelbarrow is shiny and reflective with precipitation.

2. A wheelbarrow, shining about with its redness due to the rain, is one of the most important tools for farming. In turn, thanks to the dripping water from the sky, the chickens also become glassy and cleaned with whiteness. As the chickens stand near the red wheelbarrow, they see the red wheelbarrow as a vital tool to drink water that was filled in it.

QHQ “The Red Wheelbarrow”1. Q: Why does he have the wheelbarrow next to the

chickens? Why is it important to mention the chickens?

2. Q: What is the importance of the color? Does it have one? Why is the chicken white and the wheelbarrow red?

3. Q: For what is the red wheelbarrow a metaphor?

4. Q: Why doesn’t “The Red Wheelbarrow” contain any capital letters or punctuation?

QHQ1. Q: How did his background as a well-known writer and

physician affect the way he writes this poem?

2. Q: What was the connection between “The Red Wheelbarrow” and Spring and All, the collection it first belonged to?

3. Q: How does “The Red Wheelbarrow” influence our understanding of an imagist text? How does this round-out, or help us understand the complicated subject that is inherently ambiguous?

4. Q: If “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “In a Station of the Metro” are poems, what constitutes a poem, and where do we draw the line and no longer consider something a poem?

To

ElsieThe PARAPHRASE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqpNWylzRDs

to Elsie

Paraphrase of the first few lines of “To Elsie”

The natural resources and opportunities of America are plentiful to anyone who comes and settles here. People living in the mountains of Kentucky and those living as far as the north end of New Jersey, where its lonely lakes and valleys are home to the outcast people of society, like the deaf-mutes that have been written off by society, criminals, and those who have been here long enough that no one remembers them anymore, linger. Careless, evil men flaunt their promiscuity while they work on the railroads, in the hopes of living out their dreams of finding adventure.

The pure products of Americago crazy—mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of Jerseywith its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thievesold namesand promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have takento railroadingout of sheer lust of adventure—

QHQ: “To Elsie”1. Q: But why Elise? What made her so interesting

that he had to write about her?2. Q: How is William Carlos Williams’ “To Elsie”

representative of the American Dream? 3. Q: Who, or What does Elsie symbolize, or

personify?4. Q: Why is it that only the men work and strive to

achieve this dream of prosperity? How come the only mention of women is overly sexualized?

AUTHOR INTRODUCTION

Wallace Stevens

• Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879• He lived a relatively privileged life• He went to Harvard, trying to satisfy his father’s wish for him to

become a lawyer while at the same time satisfying his own need to write.

• In 1900, he defied his parents and moved to NY to become a Journalist for The New York Tribune, though eventually he did return to law school and become a lawyer.

• He worked to make himself financially stable, but still he wrote. • In 1923, he published his first collection of poetry.

Although Steven’s work is powerful in its use of images, he is not classified as an imagist. Instead he writes in a number of styles—often three line stanzas. His early poems sometimes rhymed, some are in blank verse, and some a melodic free verse. The poems we are reading are lyric poems

AUTHOR INTRODUCTION: MINA LOY 1882–1966VISUAL ARTIST AND POET

Although Mina Loy was born in England, she did much of her work in Paris, Florence, and New York City, where her beauty and outlandish behavior shone at the center of multiple avant-garde circles. The unconventional vocabulary and syntax of Loy’s poems and their scornful treatment of love and other subjects can puzzle and offend, but no reader can question the work’s originality nor the poet’s fierce intelligence.

Neglect of Loy's poetry has lent qualified support to revisionist claims that leading male modernists like T. S. Eliot, Pound, and Joyce defined modernism so as to marginalize writers whose poetics and politics threatened their own largely conservative stance.

However, Eliot and Pound praised Loy's work. High modernist champions of technical innovation and intellectual rigor could not accuse Loy of formal conservatism or sentimentality.

Literary historians may have marginalized Loy by making her a modernist icon, woman-as-Dada, while relegating her writing to avant-garde obscurity; but equally relevant is Loy's lessened attention to her poetry in later life.

Renewed interest in her poetry belongs to the recovery of the neglected, multiple aspects of early modernism. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) Stein, whom Loy praised as "Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary," offers a definitive tribute to Loy's artistic vision. Recalling Loy's first husband's plea that she punctuate the long sentences without commas in The Making of Americans (1925), Stein notes that "Mina Loy . . . was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand."

HOMEWORKRead: Mina Loy 295-96 and “Parturition” 296-99 Post #12: Respond to one of the following prompts:1. QHQ on the “Parturition”2. Discuss “Parturition” in conjunction with Loy’s Manifesto.3. Discuss “Parturition” in conjunction with one critical theoryRead: Wallace Stevens“The Snow Man” 283 “The Emperor of Ice Cream” 284 Post #13:1. Paraphrase either poem. Be original! 2. Discuss the modernist aspects of one or both of these poems.3. Or a brief “new critical” reading of one poem4. Or do a QHQ for either “The Snow Man” or “The Emperor of

Ice Cream”