Category Archives: January 2012 challenge

NO-COMFORT ZONE Week ending November 4, 2012

Posted on by
3

This has been a good week. After so much worry about health, my symptoms seem to be giving me a break this week, for which I am very thankful. Still no appointment for tests, but I have turned a page, moved into an upbeat mode.

Ron Silliman in blogging workshop

Ron Silliman in blogging workshop (Photo credit: pesbo) Credit Pearl Pirie

And then there is MODPO!  This was week 8 out of 10. It was an assignment week, and the week we studied L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poets, including Ron Silliman, whom I met when he was in Ottawa back in March. Fascinating encyclopedic knowledge of poetry, American yes, but also Canadian. We looked at his Albany and BART poems, and had the pleasure of his participation on the discussion forums.

We studied several sections of Lyn Heijinian’s My Life, Bob Perelman‘s Chronic Meanings, and In a Restless World Like This Is, by Charles Bernstein,

English: American poet Charles Bernstein at Wr...

English: American poet Charles Bernstein at Writers’ and Literary Translators’ International Conference (Stockholm, June 30, 2008) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

who also participated in our forums. We then moved on to Emily Dickinson‘s My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun as a featured poem in the Susan Howe book, My Emily Dickinson. We heard a Poem Talk discussion of that one.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, for each poem and poet, there are audio recordings if available, often recorded Poem Talks, and a video discussion by Al Filreis and his TAs to close read or share their opinions (both, actually!) on the poems.

Coming this week we are taking a look at chance operations as a poetic constraint, and will then do the final assignment. It sounds interesting, and there is much speculation of exactly what we will be asked to do. That info comes to us at the stroke of midnight EST tonight. It will either relate to the mesostic form created by of John Cage, or Bernadette Mayer’s Experiment.  More about that next time!

No-Comfort Zone Week ending Oct. 28 2012

Posted on by
Reply

This week’s challenges have  been split between self-care and enjoying week 7 of Modern & Contemporary American Poetry over o the Coursera platform.

 

It’s week two of the CHIP program, and the constant weather changes have been playing with my aches ‘n pains and sinuses. I’ve been learning a new relaxation technique so I am hoping that will help me refocus away from that. I had started taking some supplements but they seemed to just give me more issues, so stopped again. It isn’t good to self-diagnose anyway. So let’s forget those and think about MODPO!

 

 

This week we studied the New York School, looking at Frank O’Hara’s The Day Lady Died and A Step Away from Them. These were an intro into O’Hara in preparation for Assignment 3, to do a close reading of Why I Am Not a Painter. Not really happy with my essay, but it is done, and that is the main thing.

 

We also looked at a funny pastiche by Kenneth Koch Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams which lead to a discussion forum on creating our own pastiche on this or one of the other or all of the poems we’ve looked at over the last seven weeks. This made for some really fun and strange offerings, with some poems a mix of many poets and styles parodied. (I’m not sure where some folks find the time to write so many of these or to follow so many of the discussions. This week I had to concentrate on the assignment as I tried to decipher the difference between anti-narrative and alt-narrative.Not sure I got it right.)

 

We also looked at Barbara Guest‘s 20 before considering Some Trees and Hard Times by John Ashbery.  We also met Ted Berrigan in his poem, 3 Pages, and finished up with Bernadette Mayer‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

 

 

Next week’s intro and discussion forums are now up, and tomorrow we start looking at the essays we are assigned to evaluate. And we do the intro week to Language poetry, starting with Ron Silliman who was here in Ottawa in March for a reading and workshop at A B Series. Ron was a fascinating speaker with an incredible memory for all things poetry. He even keeps up on the Canadian scene, which is great.  We’ll also look at Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and revisit Rae Armantrout before concluding with more of Silliman.

 

Looks like another great week of poetry immersion!

 

NO-COMFORT ZONE WITH THE BEATS WEEK ENDING OCTOBER 21, 2012

Posted on by
Reply

Still hanging in with the ModPo course at the end of week six. This week we read and/or listened to work from The Beats. Allen Ginsberg (Howl Part 1), a series of Jack Kerouac writings , including Essentials of Spontaneous Prose and Belief & Technique for Modern Prose. We listened to Robert Creeley‘s I Know A Man (5 versions)

Robert Creeley by Elsa Dorfman. Portrait taken...

and to a discussion of it on Poem Talk.  Although we didn’t read Anne Waldman ‘s poem, Rogue State, we did watch it on YouTube. And we read Incident by Amiri Baraka.

English: Jack Kerouac by photographer Tom Palu...

It is always interesting to watch the discussion videos with Al Filreis and his TAs, as they talk about their own interpretations. Sometimes, people on the forums agree with them, other times there are new interpretations. With more than thirty thousand students, there are a lot of different readings!

Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg

There was some controversy (still!) over the writings and performances of the Beats: their use of language, their seemingly unconnected lines and phrases. There were still people offended by Howl. And those who found Kerouac’s spontaneous riffs really quite difficult.

There was also some outside controversy when Minnesota announced a ban on courses being offered to Minnesota students from out-of-state. But that seems to have been resolved in favour of the courses being allowed. Thank goodness!

Next week, tomorrow actually, we begin Week seven, a look at the New York School.  I see poems by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch and Bernadette Mayer on the syllabus. And the third of four assignments.

This has been a fantastic experience, and we are told that we will have access to the course site for a year afterward, and there is a lot of interest in forming a ModPo Alumni. I wonder what I will do with so much time on my hands, though, when the ten weeks is up?

Related articles

No-Comfort Zone Week ending Oct. 14

Posted on by
2

For this week, of course, the challenge continued to be ModPo. We began with Ruth Lechlitner and Genevieve Taggart, and then proceeded to Harlem Renaissance poets Countee Cullen and Claude

Portrait of Countee Cullen in Central Park. Ju...

McKay. And Gwendolyn Brooks.

Next we went in a slightly different, rather Anti-modernist direction with Robert Frost’s Mending Wall. We watched a YouTube discussion about that with Bob Perelman, Rachel Blau Du Plessis, John Timpane and Taije Silverman, ably hosted by Professor Al Filreis.

I haven’t quite finished up Week 5 yet, as I still have two videos to watch. One is a discussion of Richard Wilbur‘s Cottage Street, 1953 and then X.J. Kennedy‘s ekphrastic poem on Duchamp’s painting by the same name, Nude Descending a Staircase.

Robert Frost, Dartmouth 1896.

Robert Frost, Dartmouth 1896. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is the stone wall at Frost's farm in Derr...

This is the stone wall at Frost’s farm in Derry, New Hampshire, which he described in “Mending Wall.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But I have done Wilbur’s The Death of a Toad, (1950).

Looking forward to the coming week as we begin to look at The Beats.

Also this week I am restarting the Complete Health Improvement Program, CHIP, originated by Dr. Hans Diehl. Need a refresher, and need to be more focused this time around.

Haven’t managed to keep up with The Southeast Review’s 30-day Regimen, but that will be waiting for me when I am done the ModPo course. Then it will be time to get back to my own writing!

Related articles