American Poetry After Modernism

Daniel Kane

American Poetry after Modernism

Tutor: Daniel Kane, Arts B 335, ext. 7887, email:

The course is examined by a 5,000 word essay to be submitted Summer Term. Please check your Sussex Direct site for dates and deadlines.

Before our first session it would be helpful for you to spend some weeks or months reading independently in order to give some consideration to ways of defining Modernism. You might look at Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism or Peter Nicholls’ Modernisms: A Literary Guide; also useful are Richard Gray, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century and Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Important primary texts include Pound's A Draft of XXX Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Hart Crane, The Bridge, and Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons. A useful anthology is Stephen Fender, The American Long Poem. The term ‘Postmodern’ and the transition it proposes from Modernism figures in much discussion of recent American poetry. One extremely influential essay you should read in advance is Fredric Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ in his book of the same title.

Lisa Jarnot, Joie de Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012

Lisa Robertson, 3 Summers, Coach House

Ben Lerner, No Art, Granta

Note: it’s always worth checking for used copies – go to Abebooks.com. Please note that all materials listed under the heading ‘Primary materials’ are to be purchased.

Each week’s primary reading will be supplemented by one or two articles on the poets under consideration. Please check the course Study Direct site and ensure that you read, print out, and bring articles to each session, as we will use them as sources for seminar discussion and as conceptual frames through which we read the assigned literature.

The listing below of secondary materials represents only a small sample of work available. The JSTOR and MLA databases will allow you to supplement the things I’ve suggested here. Please check the library for the course reading list, as a number of these books are held for us as class resources.

Week 1

Primary materials:

Paul Hoover, “What is Postmodern Poetry?”

Charles Olson, Selected Poems

Robert Duncan, Use selections given in P. Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry

Charles Olson, “ProjectiveVerse” (Hoover, pp. 863 – 71)

Secondary materials might include:

R. J. Bertholf and I. W. Reid, eds., Robert Duncan: the Scales of the Marvellous

M. Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance

R. Duncan, A Selected Prose

E. Faas, Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homosexual in Society

P. O’Leary, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness

D. Byrd, Charles Olson's Maximus

B. Conniff, The Lyric and Modern Poetry: Olson, Creeley, Bunting

M. Duberman, Black Mountain: an Exploration in Community

V. Katz, Black Mountain College: An Experiment in Art

C. Olson, Human Universe and Other Essays (see esp. 'Projective Verse' and 'Against Wisdom as Such')

C. Seelye, ed., Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeth's

P. Sherman, Olson's Push: Origin, Black Mountain, and Recent American Poetry

J. Riddel, 'The Decentered Image', in J. Harrari, ed., Textual Strategies

Interview with Olson, Paris Review, 49 (Summer 1970)

Week 2

Primary materials:

Jackson Mac Low, John Cage Selections in Hoover.

Secondary materials might include

Tyrus Miller’s Singular Examples: Artistic Politics And The Neo-avant-garde

“John Cage: The Conversation Game” (interview with John Cage), in Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein

Jackson Mac Low, Representative Works: 1938-1985

Jackson Mac Low, “The Poetics of Chance and the Politics of Simultaneous Spontaneity, or the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” in Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute, ed. Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb.

Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance

Charles Bernstein, “Jackson at Home,” in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984

Liz Kotz, Ed. Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art

Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage

Week 3

Primary materials:

Amiri Baraka, S.O.S Poems

Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems

Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto” (in Hoover, pp. 875-76).

Secondary materials might include:

The Leroi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader (ed. William J. Harris)

Baraka author page (online).

Epstein, Andrew. “‘Against the Speech of Friends’: Amiri Baraka Sings the ‘White Friend Blues.’” In Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing Beyond the ‘New York School.’ Ed. Daniel Kane. (Dalkey Archive Press, 2006).

Epstein, Andrew. Beautiful Enemies: Friendship in Postwar American Poetry (OUP, 2009)

Sollors, Werner Amiri Baraka-Leroi Jones : the quest for a "populist modernism"

Baraka, Amiri. The autobiography of LeRoi Jones-Amiri Baraka.

Baraka, Amiri. Somebody Blew Up America (see related online stories about this controversial poem in CounterPunch and Tom Hibbard’s essay in Jacket).

Jeffries, Judson L, editor. Black power in the belly of the beast.

Woodard, Komozi. A nation within a nation : Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power politics.

Harris, William J. The poetry and poetics of Amiri Baraka : the jazz aesthetic.

Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde

Shaw, Lytle. Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie.

O’Hara, Selected Poems (Knopf), ed. Mark Ford.

C. Altieri, ‘The Significance of Frank O’Hara’, Iowa Review, 4 (Winter 1973), 90-104

M. K. Blasing, ‘Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Speech: the Example of “Biotherm”’, Contemporary Literature, 23.1 (1982), 52-64

B. Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara

J. Elledge, Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City

F. O'Hara, 'Personalism: A Manifesto', in O'Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York

A. Hartman, ‘Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg’, Journal of Modern Literature, 28.4 (2005), 40-56

B. Perelman, 'Talking with O'Hara and Barthes' in The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History

M. Perloff, Frank O'Hara: A Poet Among Painters

S. Sontag, 'Notes on "Camp"', in Against Interpretation

H. Smith, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara

Week 4

Primary materials:

Robert Creeley use selections given in P. Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

Essay Selections on Study Direct

Secondary materials might include:

C. Bernstein, 'Hearing "Here"’: Robert Creeley's Poetics of Duration', in Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984

R. Creeley, A Quick Graph: Collected Notes and Essays

R. Creeley, Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971

C. Edelberg, Robert Creeley's Poetry

S. Fredman, Poet's Prose (Chapter 2)

M. Davidson, San Francisco Renaissance

T. Gunn, ‘Small Persistent Difficulties’, in The Occasions of Poetry

P. Middleton, ‘Silent Inscriptions of Gender: Recent Men’s Poetry’, fragmente, 4 (1991), 66-76

Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation

Michael Shumacher: Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg

Tony Trigilio, Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics

Week 5 – READING WEEK

Week 6

Primary materials:

John Ashbery, Selected Poems

Barbara Guest, use selections given in P. Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry

Secondary materials might include:

Fraser, Kathleen. Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity

Barbara Guest EPC Page (good bibliographic references and materials)

Barbara Guest Literary History Page (good bibliographic references and materials)

Wagner, Cathy. Selection of and afterword for previously unpublished poems by Barbara Guest, Chicago Review special triple issue on Guest, http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/index_53_4.shtml

B. Andrews, 'Misrepresentation (A Text for The Tennis Court Oath of John Ashbery)', in R. Silliman, ed., In the American Tree

J. Ashbery, 'The Invisible Avant-Garde', in T. B. Hess and J. Ashbery., eds., The Avant-Garde

H. Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Views: John Ashbery

D. Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry

M. Kinzie, 'Irreference: the Poetic Diction of John Ashbery', Modern Philology, 82 (1981)

D. Lehman, ed., Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery

D. Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde,

A. Dubois, Ashbery’s Forms of Attention

P. Nicholls, ‘John Ashbery and Language Poetry’, in L. Kelly, ed., Poetry and the Sense of Panic: Critical Essays on John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop

J. Norton, ‘”Whispers Out of Time”: The syntax of being in the poetry of John Ashbery’, Twentieth Century Literature, 41 (Fall 1995)

Brian Reed, ‘Twentieth-Century Poetry and the New York Art World’, in S. Fredman, ed., A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry

S. Schultz, ed., The Tribe of John: John Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry

J. Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry

G. Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets

Week 7

Primary materials:

Ted Berrigan, The Sonnets

Alice Notley, Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005

Essay Selections on Study Direct

Secondary materials might include:

M. Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other Abstractions

Alice Notley EPC Page

A. Notley, Coming After

Essays on Berrigan, Notley and related writers in Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing

After the New York School.

L. Rifkin, ‘Worrying About “Making It”: Ted Berrigan’s Social Poetics’. Contemporary Literature

Vol. 38, No. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 640-672. (Access on StudyDirect)

D. Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s.

Week 8

Primary materials:

Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day, New Directions

Lyn Hejinian, My Life

Secondary materials might include:

Mayer author page (online)

Bernadette Mayer’s Experiments List (online)

Rifkin, Libbie. Career Moves. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

Rifkin, Libbie."‘My Little World Goes On St. Mark’s Place’: Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer

and the Gender of an Avant-Garde Institution." Jacket 7 1999. 3 Dec. 2000 (online)

Essays on Mayer and related writers in Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York

Writing After the New York School.

Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Hejinian, Lyn. The Cold of Poetry. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994.

‘Lyn Hejinian Electronic Poetry Center Page’. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/hejinian/.

Essay Selections on Study Direct

Week 9

Primary materials:

Harryette Mullen, Muse and Drudge (1995), available in Recyclopedia

Edwin Torres, use selections given in P. Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry

C. Bedient, ‘The Solo Misterioso Blues – An Interview with Harryette Mullen’, Callaloo, 19. 3 (Summer 1996), 651-69

C. Bernstein, ‘Poetics of the Americas’, Modernism/Modernity, 3. 3 (1996), 1-23

C. Hogue, ‘Beyond the Frame of Whiteness: Harryette Mullen’s Revisionary Border Work’, in L. Hinton & C. Hogue, eds., We Who Love To Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics

E. Frost, ‘”Belatedly Beladied Blues”: Hybrid Traditions in the poetry of Harryette Mullen’, in Frost, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry

E. Frost, ‘An Interview with Harryette Mullen, Contemporary Literature, 41. 3 (Fall 2000), 397-421

M. Huehls, ‘ Spin Puns (and Anagrams): Exchange Economies, Subjectivity, and History in Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge’, Contemporary Literature, 44.1 (Spring 2003), 19-46

D. Kane, ‘Interview with Harryette Mullen’, What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde.

H. Mullen, ‘Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness’, Diacritics, 24. 2-3 (1994), 71-89

H. Mullen, lecture from the 2002 Naropa Summer Writing Program, available online at

L. Thomas, Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Week 10

Primary materials:

Rae Armantrout, Veil: New and Selected Poems

Ron Silliman, selections in P. Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry.

Secondary materials might include:

Lynn Keller, Rae Armantrout, “An Interview with Rae Armantrout”, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Summer, 2009), pp. 219-239

Beckett, Tom L, Bobbie West, and Robert Drake. A Wild Salience: The Writing of Rae Armantrout. Cleveland, OH: Burning Press, 2000.

Leddy, Michael. ‘“See Armantrout for an Alternate View”: Narrative and Counternarrative in the Poetry of Rae Armantrout’. Contemporary Literature 35, no. 4 (1994): 739–60. doi:10.2307/1208706.

D. Kane, ‘Interview with Rae Armantrout’, What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde.

Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 1984.

Silliman, Ronald. In the American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry. Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 2002.

Silliman, Ronald. The New Sentence, 1987.

Week 11

Primary materials:

Lisa Jarnot, Joie de Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012

Elizabeth Willis, selections in P. Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry.

Secondary materials might include:

‘EPC/ Lisa Jarnot Home Page’. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/jarnot/.

Jarnot, Lisa. Robert Duncan, the Ambassador from Venus a Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Jarnot, Lisa, Leonard Schwartz, and Chris Stroffolino. An Anthology of New (American) Poets. Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, Publishers, 1998.

Brakhage, Stan. ‘Chicago Review Article’. Chicago Review 47/48 (2001): 38–41.

‘Some Notes on Lisa Jarnot’s “Sea Lyrics” | Jacket2’.

‘EPC/ Elizabeth Willis Home Page’ http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/willis/.

Wallace, Mark, and Steven Marks. Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.

Willis, Elizabeth. Radical Vernacular Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008.

Week 12

Primary materials

Lisa Robertson, 3 Summers

Ben Lerner, No Art