Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Arrays

Models I'm mulling over for 366 (Modern Poetry):
  1. Books about modern poetry: The Pound Era, maybe some biographies & critical materials. A few suggestions came in--see the comments for my last post--but I could certainly use some more. Rachel Blau du Plessis' The Pink Guitar? Who writes well, readably well, about modern poetry outside the US?
  2. Poets and their Prose: choose some modern poets whose essays and / or letters are available, and build a course around them
  3. Another big survey, with one or two anthologies. Maybe pair Poems for the Millennium with a volume of the Norton, or pair the two Oxford anthologies (Nelson's & Tuma's).
  4. A thematically-chosen group of modernist poets, focused on one or another of the topics that went really well last time, like "Think Globally, Write Locally" (modern poets of various peripheries-become-central and / or poets with a particularly international purview) or "Faith & Doubt" (modern poets of religion, religious crisis, revisionist religion, mythology, etc.) or even "Modern Love," although I wonder whether the students from my Love Poetry course would be sick of that by now.
  5. Looking at option 4 here, I could simply reprise my two-volume-Norton survey from last time, dropping the units that didn't go so well and so forth. Tweak the old, rather than leave it behind.
Any thoughts about which books / poets might fit well in options 1, 2, or 4 here?

1 comment:

Norman Finkelstein said...

Regarding options 1 and 4b (Faith and Doubt), O'Leary's Gnostic Contagion (on Duncan, w/ excellent chapters on H.D. and Mackey) and Weinfield's The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk. Also for 1, McHale's The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole.

For option 2, Yeats, Williams, Duncan and Creeley come to mind right off the bat.

And I'll ponder a bit more...