The Very Short Poem
The Very Short Poem
Jesse Nathan
Course Description: This course examines the Very Short Poem, which, for the purposes of our study, will be defined as any verse of ten or fewer lines. Or should we say 8? The aim, at any rate, will be to understand these tiny lyric poems not as part of a minor mode, but as singular achievements answering various socio-formal cultural needs, revealing of writers and their times something that’s otherwise often inaccessible. What is this something?
Students will be exposed to key concepts in the field of poetics, but they will apply these ideas specifically to the study of brevity in poetry. Throughout the quarter, we will work on answers to a number of questions: What is lyric poetry? Is the short poem at the center of poetry itself, a form residing at the heart of lyricism, or is it something different altogether? What makes a short work particularly memorable and enjoyable? Can briefness be a form of expansiveness? What are the effects of concision—on meaning, on readers, or on poets? What is restrictive about the brief mode? What are the freedoms and challenges of it, and how does translation complicate the power of pithiness? What distinguishes short fragments (à la Sappho) from realized short verses? Has the history of poetry led us toward, or away from, the short poem? What might this say about our attention spans, and the future (or past) of reading?
Students will become familiar with exceptionally brief works by dozens of poets, from Chaucer to Robert Hass, from Robert Herrick to Rae Armantrout. We’ll also cut across geographic, national, and generic boundaries: Students will, for instance, examine haiku, and maybe also the aphoristic works of Nietzsche, Rilke’s unpublished shorts, or the (possible) poetry of Twitter and text messaging.
Textbooks:
1)The Oxford Book of Short Poems, P. J. Kavanagh and James Michie, eds.(1985)
2)Very Short Poems, a course packet assembled by instructor
3)Aram Saroyan, The Complete Minimal Poems (2007)
4)The Essential Haiku, Robert Hass, ed. (1995)
Main Assignments:
1)Paper #1: The History.A 4-page paper detailing and fleshing out the historical context of a particular short poem, utilizing at least 2 secondary sources.
2)Paper #2: The Form.A 4-page paper detailing and fleshing out the form—how it works and why, and for whom—of a second particular short poem, utilizing at least 2 secondary sources.
3)Paper #3: Final research paper and presentation, featuring thorough consideration of 3-4 additional short poems, and utilizing at least 4 secondary sources. 8-10 pages.
4)Recitation: At some point in the quarter each student will memorize a very short poem, say it for the class, and say something brief about why he or she chose it.
A Few Goals:
Skill-based:
1)The course will develop students’ close reading skills by focusing on very short texts, by zeroing in on these “droplets of language” with intensity and method.
2)The course will demystify the process of producing literary criticism by helping studentsin each stage of the making: research, planning, composition, revision.
Content-based:
3)The course will foster a critical understanding of various short poetic modes writers have deployed, the formal choices they’ve made or resisted, the meanings these forms evince.
4)The course will provide a sidelong introduction to the lyric, something of its history or essence, particularly in English literature.
Calendar:
Weeks 1-3:
We’ll work through The Oxford Book of Short Poems and the course packet, looking at early examples of the form. We’ll work also out of Robert Hass’s haiku anthology, as well as early religious texts like the Judeo-Christian Book of Proverbs, to develop an historical understanding of the international origins of very short poetry.
We’ll attempt to define the genres within the genre; to define what a very short poem does, or tries to do, and how; to distinguish it from other poetic forms and fragments; to create taxonomies of the very short verse, distinguishing among styles and formal commitments. What strategies do we need to develop to read very short poetry well and critically, and how do these methods differ from other reading practices, if they do?
Paper #1 due by the end of week 3: A 4-page paper detailing and fleshing out the historical context of a particular short poem. What, for instance, is the socio-cultural history of a particular English epigram? Or: Looking closely at one example, what historical factors might have fostered Yamazaki Sokan’s “vulgar” haiku poems?
Weeks 4-6:
We’ll continue working through The Oxford Book of Short Poems and the course packet, turning to 19th- and early 20th-century examples of the form. How do English poets view the short poem in the 19th century? Is a very short lyric a “bad” poem, and if so, when is it not? How do these ideas develop or change in the 20th-century, particularly in relation to Modernist practice?
Possibly at this point we’ll look at related formal developments in other literary and philosophical traditions, such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorisms, or Rilke’s fragmentary unpublished shorts, or Raymond Queneau’s genre-defying flash prose poems.
Paper #2 due by the end of week 6: A 4-page paper detailing and fleshing out the form itself—how it works and why, and for whom—of a particular short poem. For example: read closely a specific poem, like Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” or H.D.’s “Sea Violet,” and elucidate how the very short form might be particularly suited to a Modernist sense of poetic structure and function.
Also! We’ll begin development of the final paper. In-class discussions will cover brainstorming techniques, creating a clearly defined research question, and setting reachable research and writing goals. Considerable attention will be devoted to the study of model papers of similar length and subject matter.
Weeks 7-9:
We’ll continue working through The Oxford Book of Short Poems and the course packet, turning to late 20th-century and early 21st-century short forms. Will read Saroyan’s minimalist poetry, and also possibly explore Twitter and text messaging as poetic forms (consider, for instance, actual twitter feeds or Paul Muldoon’s 2006 series of “text message” poems).
We’ll discuss contemporary attention spans and the state of reading, perhaps in relation to “the Google problem” (as discussed in The Atlantic, and elsewhere) and what place poems hold in this situation. We’ll also hope to have extensive discussion regarding strategies for researching and writing an academic paper.
Completion of 8-10 page paper, and presentation of student research, weeks 9-10.