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ELIT 48CClass 29

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Poetry is “a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructedas a table or a motorcycle”-W. H. Auden

AGENDA

PostmodernismPostmodern Manifestos

OlsonO’Hara Bishop Ammons Lorde

Author Introduction:Ralph Ellison

Brief Lecture

Postmodernism

• What is postmodernism?– the experimental aesthetic movements of the

post–World War II era

– a multi-faceted engagement with modernist aesthetics and philosophy

• a rejection of modernism• a continuation of the “unfinished project” of

modernism• a self-critical reflection on modernism

From Modernism to Postmodernism

• Rejects 19th-century sociological realism and 20th-century psychological realism

• Considers history and fiction both as products of the imagination

• Questions whether literature can represent reality

• Focuses self-reflexively on language itself

Postmodern Fiction

Linda Hutcheon has named ‘historiographic metafiction’: a case in which the novelist treats actual events and fantasized material on an equal basis, with an emphasis on how history and fiction are events created by the imagination . . . Other writers chose to question the very presumption of representational literary art . . . Literary journalism, as always influenced by its fictive cousin, now centered less on presumed objectivity than on the experience of the journalist encountering that object” (NAAL 400–401).

• A shift from the poem as artifact to the poem as open-ended process

• An increasing emphasis on the unconscious, accident, and chance

• A growing focus on the body, gender, and women’s experiences

• A greater sense of the poet’s personal life reflected in the poetry itself

Postmodern Poetry

“After several decades in which impersonality and objectivity were the key values in poetry criticism, poets shifted the focus from the poem as artifact . . . to the poem as open-ended process.

The unconscious began to take up a larger place in poetry, and accident and chance became, at times, structuring principles . . . For some poets a focus on the body brought attention to issues of gender and the ways in which the particularity of a woman’s embodied experiences had been silenced in poetry . . . A poetry open to the unconscious and centered in the body became more personal, inviting into the poem the particulars of a poet’s life” (NAAL 400).

Charles Olson1910-1979

A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)

Audre Lorde1934- 1992

Group Discussion: Postmodern manifestos

Frank O'Hara(1926-1966)

Elizabeth Bishop1911 –1979

“On the upstairs balconies, the customers are being hustled by every conceivable kind of bizarre shuck. All kinds of funhouse-type booths. Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat. Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.” (408).

Hunter S. Thompson

“Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing”

“But nobody can handle that other trip—” (408).

QHQ: Thompson

1. Q: Thompson’s writing seems to be very fictional and new compared to other stories that we have read.

2. Q. Was Hunter S. Thompson disturbed?3. Q: What does acid have to do with the post

modernist manifestos?4. Q. In terms of literary criticism, is there a school of

drug/psychedelic criticism?5. Q. Has our reality become something akin to what

Thompson describes in his manifesto?6. Q: How does one’s perception of reality form one’s

opinion of it?

“(1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it” (409).

“(2) the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composition”

– “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” (410).

(3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished

– “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (410).

Charles OlsonCharles Olson

QHQ Olson

1. Q: After reading Mary Klages’s “Postmodernism,” [what] could the quote “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (410) mean in Charles Olson’s “From Projective Verse”?

FRANK O’HARAFRANK O’HARA

• In “Personism,” O’Hara defines the poem as an intimate link connecting two people. – “I went back to work and wrote a poem for [a

person I was in love with]. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement . . . which puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person.”

• In “Personism,” O’Hara defines the poem as an intimate link connecting two people. – “I went back to work and wrote a poem for [a

person I was in love with]. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement . . . which puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person.”

QHQ O’Hara

1. Question: How does Frank O’Hara’s movement “Personism” reflect the postmodernist movement of the time?

ELIZABETH BISHOPELIZABETH BISHOP• “In general, I deplore the ‘confessional.’ ”

• “But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & father and sex lives and so on.”

• “I can’t bear to have anything you write tell—perhaps—what we’re really like in 1972—perhaps it’s as simple as that.”

• “In general, I deplore the ‘confessional.’ ”

• “But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students’ mothers & father and sex lives and so on.”

• “I can’t bear to have anything you write tell—perhaps—what we’re really like in 1972—perhaps it’s as simple as that.”

QHQ Bishop

1. Q: Isn’t Bishop’s “manifesto” (letter to Robert Lowell) a critique of post-modern notions of truth, rather than a post-modern manifesto?

2. Q: Is it considered unacceptable to incorporate and alter aspects of one’s life into a work of fiction or poetry, as Robert Lowell did in Dolphin?

3. Q: Why do postmodernist view worldly things as secondary?

4. Is it important for authors to write about their society in realistic terms or do exaggerated/idealized worlds have more impact on the reader?

5. Q: Is Bishop covering [up] something [that makes] her [afraid]?

A. R. AMMONSA. R. AMMONS

• “How does a poem resemble a walk?”– “each makes use of the whole body”

– “every walk is unreproducible, as is every poem”

– “each turns, one or more times, and eventually returns”

– “the motion occurs only in the body of the walker or in the body of the words”

• “How does a poem resemble a walk?”– “each makes use of the whole body”

– “every walk is unreproducible, as is every poem”

– “each turns, one or more times, and eventually returns”

– “the motion occurs only in the body of the walker or in the body of the words”

QHQ Ammons

• Q: In A.R Ammons Manifesto, do the walks interpret our lives and identity?

• Q: Why does Ammons state “[the motion occurring in the body] is nonreproducible and nonlogical”? (Ammons 416)

• Q: If the “walk,” used as a metaphor for poetic discovery, confirms a “previous intuition,” how can it be “nonlogical”?

AUDRE LORDEAUDRE LORDE

• “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

• “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to discipline (transpose) them into language that catches those feelings so that they can be shared.”

• “Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

• “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

• “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to discipline (transpose) them into language that catches those feelings so that they can be shared.”

• “Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

QHQ Lorde

1. Q: What does Lorde mean when she says that “poetry is not only dream or vision, but a skeleton architecture of our lives”?

2. Q: Why does Lorde believe that poetry is necessary for women?

3. Q: [Is] poetry “a vital necessity of our existence”?

Author Introduction

Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was named after the celebrated poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, by his father who wanted his son to become a poet. Today Ellison is mostly remembered as the mastermind who wrote the emotive and gripping novel “Invisible Man” (along with many others) which met with much critical success, winning the National Book Award in 1953. 

Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on 1st March 1914. He was born to Ida Millsap and Lewis Alfred Ellison and had a brother Herbert Millsap Ellison. In his initial years Ellison and his family had to deal with difficult times. In 1965, Ellison received the honor of his book “Invisible Man” being declared the most important novel since the end of WW11 by survey of 200 prominent literary figures.

HOMEWORK

Read Ralph Ellison, “The Prologue,” and “Battle Royal” from Invisible Man. 206-224

Post #29 Choose one: What does the reader know about the narrator solely on the basis of

the Prologue? Explain both what he reveals about himself explicitly and what inferences can be drawn, justifying your findings as you go along.

Why would the audience listening to the narrator’s speech have reacted so strongly to the narrator’s mistake? Discuss the implications of his slip of the tongue.

QHQ