Photo from ModPo on Coursera
ModPo. ModPolians. ModPo People. What on earth am I on about??
Well, last year, there was Coursera, and a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC for short!) on Modern & Contemporary American Poetry. And it was free. 10 weeks. This was an area of my education that was a major gap, so I decided to check it out. I wanted to know more, much more, about American and about Contemporary poetry. And what Language poetry, Conceptual poetry and the NY School were about. Dickinson. Whitman. The Beats.
(Kerouac! Ginsberg! et al. ) And what of Gertrude Stein? Sure, I knew about a rose being a rose. Other names looked back at me from the prospectus: Frost. That guy who wrote about a Red Wheelbarrow. Ashbery. Armantrout. Silliman. Ok, heard of them. Bök (Hey! a Canadian!) But Bergvall? O’Hara? Niedecker? Goldsmith? MacLow? Cage? These and some others I hadn’t met before. Tzara? Dadaism? Mesostics? Really?
English: Participants at a Kelly Writers House event honoring Gertrude Stein (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So there I was. Fast forward 10 weeks and I was no longer interested in poetry. No, now I was obsessed! I had spent just about every waking moment on the computer. Talking to fellow students in the UK, Phillippines, Germany, India…all over the world. I posted about it here last November: https://quillfyre.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/no-comfort-zone-modpo-week-10-the-final-week/
Few of us were able to let it go after 10 weeks. Friendships and discussions continued. A number of us signed on for 2013 as Community Teaching Assistants. Our job? Help new students to ease into the course, find their way around, and share our own uncertainties from last year. Make them feel at home.
For those who were lucky enough to be in Philadelphia for the weekly live webcasts, there was the teaching staff and professor Al Filreis, at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, and home of ModPo.
From the photos, it always looks quite warm and welcoming, the student faces always smiling. They’ve made the pilgrimage to ModPo!
Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Maybe next year…
ModPo 2 has been as interesting a journey as ModPo 1 was. Hoping to stick around for the next time too.
This won’t surprise those who’ve heard me go on and on!
One thing that ModPo always provides is a series of poem challenges in the study group I hang out with: The Breakfast Club. Or, as it is known this year, the BC, BC 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3! We post about all manner of things poetic and not so poetic. A recurring theme this year has been bacon, in keeping with the idea of breakfast! So you will see some bacon references in the poems I am posting here as my journey journal for ModPo 2.
Towards a Breakfast of Excess With apologies to Scott Owens– by The Past Head Crone CAS a pastiche based on Towards a Poetics of Excess By Scott Owens, perhaps a gentle parody of the BC!
English: A pile of bacon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
What the BC2 needs is more
bacon, longer
threads, posts that
tower pitilessly over the merciless,
ideas that swell with babble & blab,
ideas that consider refuse
or politically correct nonsense,
waffles ripe with intentional falls
and ready to burst with maple flavour.
BCers who will watch anything
on the flick of a dial.
Why choose
when you can watch them all?
Suppose a BCer came to a cliff.
Suppose a waffle fell against vegemite.
Suppose the bacon ban pushed me to a pouting.
Suppose there were no ModPo forums.
Suppose I couldn’t discuss any more nonsense with you
and all I had to eat
were the poems I held in my only brain.
Who wouldn’t want a blab of the pave,
one that leaves you almost comatose,
tone-deaf and secreteing decibels,
grasping for straws, for bacon, for anything
to add another layer of nonsense, another layer of brilliance?
CAS Sept. 2013
I Effuse My Images in…Hot Places?! (a found in the forums poem)
I haven’t seen the video discussion yet
this poem as post-coital melancholy
Who killed the pork chops?
a Marxian question
What peaches and what
babies in the
penumbras!
English: A femaleAfrican Bush Elephant raises her trunk as a warning sign in MikumiNational Park, Tanzania (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Who are Emily and Walt’s Literary Children?
Hands, the only part of her body she mentioned. Is that meaningful?
Geneticists discover: Whitman was right. We DO contain multitudes
Don’t Think of an Elephant
THIS IS WAY BETTER THAN FACEBOOK
CAS Sept. 17 2013
A Screed in the Condensary
Distillation: a condensation,
a process. Cognac from wine,
heated, cooled.
A liquid, never brewed,
now different from its source.
Art: a similar process,
source and final versions related,
but different: a poem.
Mere screed.
No layoffs in this elaboratory…..
CAS riffing Ellen Dillon, during our Niedecker poems period
Sept. 2013
TOUGH COOKERY (The Steinery Concoctions) Oct. 4, 2013 CAS (Gertrude riffs)
A YELLOW OMELETTE.
If eggs are eggshell white if they absorb moisture and heat and even butter, if they sticky will slick a pan that has no heavy greasing, if they manage this and it is not morning it is not at all morning if they manage this they need a menu.
A SLAB OF BACON.
031/365 – Homemade Bacon (Photo credit: djwtwo)
All attention to constant spatters to a crackling, all attention to this creates out of it what is red in tasting and perhaps opaque in fat. The purpose of this is certain. Imagine a morning chosen and agreed, imagine it is also consensus, imagine no other meal will happen and no plates appear, imagine everything else on the menu is burnt in a very large pan and might have turned into dry hard crisps, imagine all those things made a vegemite and imagine it was imagined, imagine the vegetarian way to a breakfast, if you imagine this at midnight and in a hushed tone, if you imagine this in spite of the required event of an uncertain body of water and a ski slope in the distance, imagine this and an abundant buffet a groaning expanse of buffet is included certainly, it is not real and pleasant and tasting good. This which was so often a constraint was recurring.
BURNT TOAST.
Butter, what is butter, it is only lacking a knife.
The timing in that is that crumbs spoil a plate. The burning has begun. There is that smell. But perhaps we have, we have that scraping and that crust removal and quickly, neatly any is gone, mornings there is coffee and there will be a gooseberry preserve and ginger mostly ginger is that tart and tingling. For sure, toasting is fine-tuning and enticing.
There is no sense in empathy and in chemistry. There can be poached eggs in Mexican salsa. There is no recipe. There is no particular brand to use. It was used last week, that showed tomatoes and perhaps red peppers and onions. It lacked no taste and perhaps if substitutions are not necessary there is some sense in eating.
Bacon Strips Acquainted With The Eggs
Bacon and eggs plate 4 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(a pastiche based on a Frost poem, I Have Been Acquainted with the Night..a Breakfast Club offering)
By Carol A Chilly (num de ploom)
Two bacon strips reside between the eggs.
Beside fresh toast and jam—and bread and jam.
The cups held tea but only now the dregs.
I cooked the eggs with finest butter first
I set the time for seven on the dial
Then ground the meat to flavour liverwurst.
I set each place at table with blue plate
And white napkins of French chantilly lace
the silver service too; do not come late!
But not because I want you here on time
The breakfast will still be upon your plate
I cannot promise it will taste as fine
If everything is walking on two legs.
Two bacon strips reside between the eggs.
October 6, 2013
CAS riffing Frost
Howling at the Sun
(riffing my favourite, Allen Ginsberg)
The ashcans of America rise up and rant out of their dark alleys of broken glass,
beat and battered and brilliant through the stale beer of doom
floating out of the hydrogen afternoon in Brooklyn, lost conversation
on the windowsills threatening to jump screaming
and vomiting eyeballs disgorged from subways
endlessly ridden beneath neon blinking lights fueled by benzedrine
clattering past cemeteries where bodies locked in bone-grinding dance
of ashes wander at midnight in the cosmos of Idaho
amid visionaries in limousines of winter illumined by the streetlights
and washed in rural rain, spattered in jazz riffs, hopeless and incomprehensible in the light of morning
at the bottom of a river bloated with orange crates and gibberish, coughing out the skeletons drifting down towards New Jersey in the animal soup of alchemy in a metered timeless unknown, naked and bleached, the suns of a thousand Augusts.
Carol A. Stephen
October 15, 2013
Always Bees, Birds, Bloodworms, Blunt Hymns 
Always bananas and alfalfa allay
bees, never engender bejewelled
biddy bidding, biding big birds
blobs block bloodroot, bloodworms bloom
blunt, blurt bluffs, brusk, but
cry gypsy hymns, myths ply shy wry rhythms spryly
CAS Oct. 30, 2013
a Eunoiac style poem after Christian Bök
RIFFING INGRID RUTHRIG, a fellow ModPolian
dense full so many images assault on senses once twice a third and more so Silliman so Hejinian so Guest so Ruthrig too I need time and space to absorb comprehend and be amazed and bemused or is that beMused one starry sky upon another a galaxy of bright points light in its extreme brilliance and play of colour on colour on odour on taste and I try to fill each line to the margins and it goes so wrong over and over perhaps done by Monday or Tuesday some year
Carol A. Stephen
November 7, 2013
As it was last year, there is sadness that it is over, and now we look forward to going deeper into other poems until the next time!
Related articles
- Meta-poetics of MOOCs (saintfallen.wordpress.com)
Quillfyre 