Senior Seminar

Senior Seminar

Episodes From Modern Poetry: The New York School In International Dialogue
Course Number: 
190
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Robert Kaufman
Days: 
M
Time: 
2-5
Semester: 
Location: 
204 Dwinelle

[Note: Students enrolling in this seminar will be assumed to have experience with the close reading and analysis of poetic form, content, and context, and to be at least somewhat familiar with  the main lines or moments in American poetry’s 19th-20thC. development, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, through the modernism  of  Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Hughes, Brooks, et al, the postmodernism of the Plath, Lowell, Sexton, the Beats, etc. ]

This seminar will center on the work of the poets of what’s popularly called “The New York School”  (initially meant to connect the poetry to “New York  School”  Abstract  Expressionist and post-Abstract Expressionist painting).  Perhaps more than any other grouping within post-1945 American poetry, the New York School has–controversially–been termed “The Last Avant-Garde,” in the specific sense of being deemed the last trend within experimental American poetry to have captured “mainstream” attention and admiration. The New York School poets have in some ways become legendary: John Ashbery has pulled off the trick of consistently emerging, over the last few decades, at the heart of debates about “who is America’s `greatest’ living poet?” and as a favorite case study in the “difficulty” or “obscurity” of modern and contemporary poetry; Frank O’Hara’s poetry has, for better or worse, been seen to constitute an oeuvre that manages to seem simultaneously hip, spontaneous, accessible, and yet brilliant, philosophically weighty, and culturally (also perhaps politically) provocative; Barbara Guest  has been repeatedly mentioned as one of postmodern America’s most innovative, rigorous practitioners and re-makers of lyric art’s forms and structures and ambition to capture social experience that might otherwise escape apprehension; while James Schuyler has become a model for crystalline figurings of how the temporal experience of everyday life can yield genuine philosophical complexity.

We’ll begin the seminar with brief but crucial readings in one of the international sources for much–though by no means all–of the New York School’s poetic education: the tradition of modern French poetry and poetics that extends from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé through the French surrealists; readings will be mostly of the English translations of these poets, though we’ll work with facing-page French/English editions, and we’ll pay some attention to the prosody of the original French texts. [Students will not be required to have reading knowledge of French,] We’ll then spend the bulk of the semester closely and carefully reading the poetry and criticism of and about the above-mentioned New York School poets (with special emphasis on poetic form and its experimental attempts to engage sociopolitical, cultural, and historical reality, and on the question of what does–or doesn’t–make certain kinds of poetry or poetic form aesthetically, socially, culturally, or politically “avant-garde”). Via the New York School’s own writings and other texts of criticism, theory, and aesthetics, we’ll think about New York School poetry’s relations to the French, British, and American poetry that precedes and influences it, as well as its conversations with the international poetry (and related art) contemporaneous with it, from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.  We’ll spend significant time thinking about the importance of Abstract Expressionist and post-Abstract Expressionist painting to the New York School poets, and we’ll therefore look at some of that painting and the art criticism and theory that has engaged it, including art criticism by the New York School poets themselves.  Finally, we’ll glance at the “second generation and after” New York School poets, as well as poets adjacent to and in conversation with the New York School, including Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Bill Berkson (who’ll visit our seminar), Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles.