1. Essay due in 60 hours?
Prefer to volunteer as a tribute
instead?
ELIT
48C
Class
27

2. Shall we negotiate?

3. Carolyn Keen Literature Prize
• Awards: Money! 100-300 bucks!
• Winner published in the Red
Wheelbarrow
• Deadline extended until Tuesday,
May 28
• Requirement 3-10 pages

4. To Apply
1. Submit a one-page, typed cover letter
stating academic and career goals. Please
include your name, email address, home
address, and home phone. Be sure to
identify the course for which you wrote your
essay.
2. Submit two copies of your essays to Amy
Leonard’s mailbox in the Language Arts
Division Office by Tuesday, May 28th

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

6. AGENDA
Postmodern Manifestos
Olson
O’Hara
Bishop
Ammons
Lorde
Postmodernism
Author Introduction:
Ralph Ellison

7. Charles Olson
1910-1979
Frank O'Hara
(1926-1966)
Elizabeth Bishop
1911 –1979
A. R.
Ammons
(1926-2001)
Audre Lorde
1934- 1992

8. “(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
Do Olson’s three points apply only to a radically new form of postmodern
poetry, or are these principles that apply to all poetry? Is “projective
verse” a specific kind of poetry, or is it better characterized as a poetic
sensibility?
Do Olson’s three points apply only to a radically new form of postmodern
poetry, or are these principles that apply to all poetry? Is “projective
verse” a specific kind of poetry, or is it better characterized as a poetic
sensibility?

9. 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.”

10. 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.”

11. In “Personism,” O’Hara defines the poem as an
intimate link connecting two people. In her letter to
Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop rails against what
she considers excessive intimacy in poetic
expression. How can such different opinions
toward the personal in poetry both be considered
under the heading of “postmodern poetry”? Is one
more postmodern than the other? Whether or not
they agree with each other, are they both
responding to a shared set of concerns about
poetry? About life in the post–World War II era?
In “Personism,” O’Hara defines the poem as an
intimate link connecting two people. In her letter to
Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop rails against what
she considers excessive intimacy in poetic
expression. How can such different opinions
toward the personal in poetry both be considered
under the heading of “postmodern poetry”? Is one
more postmodern than the other? Whether or not
they agree with each other, are they both
responding to a shared set of concerns about
poetry? About life in the post–World War II era?

12. 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”

13. Ammons contends that poetry and walking are alike in that
“both the real and the fictive walk are externalizations of an
inward seeking.”
Let’s talk about that in terms of this: “A poetry . . . centered
in the body became more personal, inviting into the poem
the particulars of a poet’s life.”
How do Ammons’s ideas about the physicality of poetry
illuminate the debate between Bishop and O’Hara about
using poetry to communicate private matters? Would
Ammons agree with Bishop or O’Hara? Or is Ammons
changing the terms of the debate entirely, shifting our
attention to physical experience rather than personal
experience?

14. 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.”

15. Lorde is making some big claims about the
importance of poetry. Is she overstating her case?
Is poetry as important as she claims it to be? If
you don’t think that poetry per se is as important
as Lorde insists, what if we read her manifesto to
be a defense of language as a whole? Do we
need language—and, in particular, the kind of
precise, articulate, and beautiful language that we
find in poetry—to make sense of our existence as
human beings? What would life be like without
language to give meaning to it?

16. Brief Lecture
Postmodernism

17. • 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

18. • 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

19. In fiction “the issue under debate was realism. Whether
grounded in sociological observation (as some later
nineteenth-century writers would have it) or in psychology
and myth (the favorite of some twentieth-century
moderns), such representation had become, by 1960, an
orientation harder and harder to defend . . . One response
by subsequent writers would be to write what the critic
Linda Hutcheon has called ‘historiographic metafiction,’ 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).

20. • 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

21. “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).

22. Author Introduction
Ralph Ellison

23. 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.

24. HOMEWORK
 Read Ralph Ellison, “The Prologue,” and “Battle Royal” from
Invisible Man. 206-224
 Post #27 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