Friday, Feb. 6 — Jazz Poetry Day 3

(left to right): Thomas Sayers Ellis, Fred Moten, A.L. Nielsen, Kevin Young

On Friday, we'll look at we'll look at a quartet of contemporary poets working within the shadows of Hughes, Baraka, and the Beats while also transforming the sounds and syntax of more modern musical forms: Thomas Sayers Ellis, Fred Moten, A.L. Nielsen, and Kevin Young.

Our selections from Thomas Sayers Ellis come from his wonderful first collection, The Maverick Room (Graywolf, 2005), and will include the complete title suite. We'll read a handful of pieces by Fred Moten, taken from two of his earlier books, Hughson's Tavern (leon works, 2008) and B. Jenkins (Duke University, 2010). You'll find several full-length readings by Moten on his PennSound author page, including segmented tracks for many of the poems we'll read for today, and if you're interested in further reading, check out 2014's The Feel Trio, which was a finalist for the National Book Award this year. The source of our readings from A.L. Nielsen is his latest collection, A Brand New Beggar (Steerage Press, 2013), and you can hear him reading his work on his PennSound author page (though sadly no tracks are available for our selections). Finally, we'll read some pieces from the original version of Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts, a book inspired by the work of maverick painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (Zoland Books, 2002), which reappeared in a remixed version published by Knopf in 2005.

Thomas Sayers Ellis (from The Maverick Room): [PDF]

• A Pack of Cigarettes
• Sticks
• The Maverick Room (complete sequence)

Fred Moten (Hughson's Tavern marked "HT," all others from B. Jenkins): [PDF]

• jazz (as ken burns (HT) [MP3]
• trumpeters (HT)
• bebop (HT)
• billie holiday/roland barthes
• fishbone/joseph jarman [MP3]
• elvin jones, malachi favors, steve lacy [MP3]
• yopie prins
• sherrie tucker, francis ponge, sun ra [MP3]
• william parker/fred mcdowell [MP3]
• cecil taylor/almeida ragland [MP3]
• charlie parker

A.L. Nielsen (from A Brand New Beggar): [PDF]

• from KANSAS
• A Farfisa for Margo
• "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" (A Slide with Songs)

Kevin Young (from To Repel Ghosts): [PDF]

• Horn Players
• Discography Two
• Langston Hughes
• Charlie Chan on Horn
• Savoy
• Victor 25448 { 1987 }

Wednesday, Feb. 4 — Jazz Poetry Day 2

Clockwise from top left: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Ken Nordine

For our second day looking at the intersections of jazz and poetry, we'll consider work from a variety of authors affiliated with the Beat Generation, along with a few fellow travelers. As was the case with Langston Hughes' The Weary Blues, here we'll see quite a few collaborations between poets and musicians,  as well as a wide variety of poems that seek to transmute the sounds, the energy and the ethos of jazz as an art form.  Here's a breakdown of our readings:

Jack Kerouac (PDF name  /  track name)

• from The Subterraneans  /  "Excerpts from 'The Subterraneans'"
• from "The Railroad Earth"  /  "October in the Railroad Earth"
• "The Beginning of Bop"  /  "Fantasy: the Early History of Bop"`
• "Some Western Haikus"  /  "American Haikus"
• from Mexico City Blues (choruses 239–241)  /  "Charlie Parker"
• from "San Francisco Blues" (choruses 1-21)  /  "Poems from the Unpublished 'Book of Blues'"
• from "McDougal Street Blues" (Canto Uno)  / "McDougal Street Blues"
• from "the Bowery Blues"  /  "Bowery Blues"

Additionally, it might be helpful to take a look at two brief craft essays by Kerouac that describe the creative process behind his "spontaneous bop prosody": "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose."

Bob Kaufman

• "Round About Midnight"
• "Jazz Chick"
• "On"
• "O-Jazz-O"

Gregory Corso

• "Requiem for 'Bird' Parker, Musician"
• "For Miles"

We'll call those our main readings for the class, but here are a few supplemental readings/tracks/etc. that will give you additional perspectives on this particular track of jazz-influenced poetry.

First up, a few tracks by Ken Nordine, purveyor of the "somewhat new medium" of "word jazz": 

"Hunger is From"



A playlist of animated tracks from the album Colors, which offered up beautifully absurd portraits of 34 different hues.

Here's "The Clown" by Charles Mingus with improvised narration by Jean Shepherd:

Next, a few tracks by Kenneth Patchen, an early experimenter in musical collaborations.  Compare the minimalist "The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves", which you can listen to below:

to "The Lute in the Attic," which was a favorite of New York School poets like Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett:





At the end of this clip of the John Coltrane Quartet performing "Afro-Blue," legendary jazz critic (and Rolling Stone founding editor) Ralph J. Gleason talks about the relationship between jazz and poetry:

The thing that a modern jazz musician does — and which you should really keep in mind when you see him in concerts, or see him in jazz clubs — is somewhat similar to looking at a poet standing in the middle of a supermarket improvising poetry. They are called upon by the discipline of this art form to go into public places where people are gathered informally and spontaneously create music.  Unlike a poet, unlike a writer of a novel, unlike a painter, they have no opportunity to take this product that they have created and reform it and correct the mistakes that they might have made or change the way in which they approach it — what they do is done for all time right then when they do it.  This is a very unique thing about jazz and it's one of the things that gives it a particular quality of aliveness that makes it one of the most interesting and vital of all contemporary art forms.

Finally, as another tangential approach to the overlap of jazz and poetry, I offer up a few select tracks by legendary bandleader and songwriter Slim Gaillard, an influence on Beat author like Kerouac, who took scat singing to a new dimension with his invented hipster language, Vout (you can browse a "Vout-o-Reenee Dictionary" here):

"Yep-Roc-Heresay"

"Cement Mixer (Put-Ti Put-Ti)"

All of Wednesday's reading and listening can be found here: [ZIP]

Monday, Feb. 2 — Jazz Poetry Day 1

Langston Hughes at home in Harlem.

Moving on from last week's foundational readings in American poetry, we'll spend a full week looking at literature influenced by another uniquely American art form, jazz. Our investigations will cross both generational and racial boundaries, as well as those of form.

We'll start with a healthy selection of work by Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance's poet laureate, taken from Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (Vintage Classics, 1959).  Because I've scanned these two pages at a time, there are extra pieces of poems thrown into the mix, but here are the titles I'd like you to read:

• The Weary Blues
• Hope
• Reverie on the Harlem River
• Morning After
• Genius Child
• Song for Billie Holiday
• Fantasy in Purple
• Trumpet Player
• Midnight Dancer
• Misery
• Dream Boogie
• Projection
• Flatted Fifths
• Dream Boogie: Variation
• Harlem
• Good Morning

You'll also want to take a look at Hughes' essay, "Jazz as Communication" and browse through his 1958 album, Weary Blues (which features musical collaborations with both Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather).

Amiri Baraka in Newark, 2007.

We'll also read a selection of work by LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, an immensely and multifariously talented writer (of poetry, plays, fiction, and criticism) and influential underground publisher who came of age in the 1950s alongside the poets of the Beat Generation, the New York School, the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, and the Black Mountain school, though never quite fitting in with any of those groups. During the turbulent 60s, he'd become politically radicalized and become a founding member of the Black Arts Movement. Here are our titles for Baraka:

• "In Memory of Radio"
• "Way Out West"
• "Symphony Sid"
• "Notes for a Speech"
• "Short Speech to My Friends": MP3
• "Black Dada Nihilismus": MP3
• "A Poem for Speculative Hipsters": MP3
• "A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand": MP3
• "Tone Poem"
• "Poem for HalfWhite College Students": MP3
• "Pres Spoke in a Language"
• "AM/TRAK"

I'm also including a few short pieces of jazz criticism by Baraka from the early 60s, to give you a taste of his work in that mode.

All of Monday's readings and listenings can be found in one file here: [ZIP]

Friday, Jan. 30: Projective Verse

Charles Olson (left) strikes a pensive pose.

We'll wrap up our third-week crash course in American poetics with an era-defining manifesto by Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," in which he lays out his ideas concerning the composition of modern poetry, including "composition by field" and the relationship between the breath and the poetic line. As a complement to Olson's essay, we'll also take a look at a little of his poetry, along with selections from two of his Black Mountain school peers, Robert Creeley and Paul Blackburn.

Charles Olson

• Projective Verse

• the Kingfishers [MP3]
• I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You [MP3 (n.b. draft read here quite different from final version)]
• Maximus, to Himself [MP3]
• The Songs of Maximus: Song 1 [MP3 (starts around 3:00 and follows with Song 2)]
• The Songs of Maximus: Song 2 [MP3 (Song 1 and 2 at the beginning)]

Robert Creeley

• I Know a Man [MP3]
• A Wicker Basket [MP3]
• The Rain [MP3]
• For Love [MP3]
• The Answer [MP3]
• Sing Song [MP3]
• The Invitation [MP3]
• The Language [MP3]

Paul Blackburn

• 7th Game : 1960 Series [MP3]
• Brooklyn Narcissus [MP3]
• Ritual VIII
• Ritual X : the Evening Pair of Ales
• The One Night Stand: an Approach to the Bridge
• Definition
• Alameda

Wednesday, Jan. 28: the Objectivists

(right-to-left) William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen

Moving forward from the 19th century to the 20th, we'll spend Wednesday's class getting familiar with the Objectivists, who represented America's first uniquely native poetic movement — that is, following from our discussion of Whitman, poets who wrote about contemporary American culture in an authentic American voice (hence poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound don't make the cut). The group was formally enshrined in a 1931 issue of Poetry, where Louis Zukofsky's introduction to a group of curated poems offers a multi-faceted definition for the movement:

An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. (Military use)—That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars. 

Inspired by Pound's dictum, "Make It New," the Objectivists sought to make a clear break with poetry of the past. William Carlos Williams offered up his own slogans — "Compose. (No ideas / but in things) Invent! — while affirming that "The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic." Outside of the Objectivists, we find similar sentiments, demonstrating a move away from the over-complex poetics of Pound and Eliot: cf. Marianne Moore, who demands work written "not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand, / but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!"

We'll consider a handful of poems from four major poets affiliated with the movement: Williams, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, and George Oppen. If you're looking to do further reading down the line, you might want to check out work by Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, and Basil Bunting.

William Carlos Williams

• This Is Just to Say [MP3 / text alignment]
• The Red Wheelbarrow [MP3]
• Between Walls [MP3]
• The Cold Night [MP3]
• Complaint [MP3]
• Blizzard
• Danse Russe [MP3 / text alignment]
• To a Poor Old Woman [MP3]
• The Great Figure

Lorine Niedecker

• Poet's work
• Foreclosure [MP3]
• Three Poems
• Linnaeus in Lapland
• "A monster owl"

Charles Reznikoff

• Ghetto Funeral
• Night Piece
• Depression [MP3]
• A Group of Verse

George Oppen

• Discrete Series
• Street
• Primitive
• From a Photograph [MP3]
• Product

Monday, Jan. 26: Walt Whitman

The good, grey poet in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1860s, as photographed by Matthew Brady.

One could make an argument that — in spite of the achievements of Wheatley, Longfellow, Dickinson and Poe, among others — American poetry truly begins with the 1855 publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. In large part, that argument would rest on whether you define a national literature as merely having its origin in a given location, or whether it must reflect and embody the nature and spirit of its homeland. Whitman is a great cataloguer, a voracious explorer of the things that filled up the world around him, and one major part of that was the soundscape of a nascent America, something that had never occurred to his predecessors, who measured themselves against continental aesthetics.  

While this goal fits beautifully within our understanding of the sonic and performative origins of poetry, and even more so the symbolic role song (in its myriad guises) plays within Whitman's poetics, we must understand that his attempts, while radical for their times, were still somewhat constrained by the ongoing evolution of American English. Lew Welch (who we'll read later this term) speaks briefly to this when he observes that:

Now, William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein and Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and Sherwood Anderson were working on [authentically rendering American speech] around 1908 on. The reason that they could start working with that at this time was that for the first time in history, the first time in the world, there was such a thing as American speech. Whitman had no language to write in. If you read Whitman with this in mind you’ll notice these incredibly clumsy frenchified funny words. It’s just amazing that the man wrote such great, you know, really world poetry, when he had no language to work in. He just had a hodgepodge. He’s working in the rubble of Europe and he’s sitting in the smokes of industrial America. Wow, how he ever put anything together out of that is a sign of his true greatness.

In other words, poetry doesn't catch up to language (and vice-versa) until we get to the 20th century, but without the heroic efforts of Whitman, we might have waited a lot longer.

Our readings for Monday will focus primarily on Whitman's magnum opus, "Song of Myself," with three other poems added to the mix. While we'll address these poems in a general sense, you'll also want to keep an eye out for their aurality and orality: their internal music and the sounds they document.

• "One's Self I Sing"
• "I Hear America Singing"
• "Song of Myself"
• "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

Friday, Jan. 23 — Foundations 4: Eno and Schaeffer

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, looking far more sensible than his glam heyday.

We're wrapping up our four foundations courses with a few more readings from the musical sphere, which, nonetheless, have useful implications for the sorts of poetic investigations we'll be doing this semester —either as direct influences on some of the writers we'll be reading, or as proponents of techniques and methodologies that parallel the aesthetics of our authors.

We begin with Brian Eno, a groundbreaking (non-)musician and producer who's worked with the likes of David Bowie, Devo, Talking Heads, and U2, and is perhaps best known as an innovator and originator of ambient music, which draws heavily from the ideologies of John Cage. Below you'll find two masterpieces of the genre, along with their liner notes, which provide a surprisingly succinct explanation of the ideas behind these works. Read the notes and take a few minutes to listen to a little of each piece (or better still, leave them running in the background as you do your other readings, brush your teeth, do laundry, etc.):

Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) [liner notes]

Discreet Music (1975) [liner notes]

I'd also like you to read Eno's germinal 1979 essay, "The Studio as Compositional Tool," which speaks directly to the challenges and advantages of working objectively and transformatively with creative materials in a hands-on fashion, and provides some useful contexts for the development of the practices that we now take for granted.

Pierre Schaeffer in the studio.

From there, we'll move on to Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995), whose ideas we've already encountered in Michel Chion's writings on reduced listening. Schaeffer's pivotal works emerged from his employment at Radiodiffusion Française (the French national television and radio network) in the postwar era, where he engineered and hosted radio programs and composed music for the air. He's credited as the father of musique concrète, the precursor to contemporary sample-based musics from hip-hop to plunderphonics to mashup culture, in which acousmatic materials (i.e. prerecorded sounds divorced from their sources and semantics) are edited, manipulated and collaged to create new sounds. Etude aux chemins de fer (Study of the railroads), composed in 1948, is his first major breakthrough in this genre:

For Friday I'd like to to read a few excerpts from his In Search of a Concrete Music, first published in France in 1952, but not available in an English-language translation until 2012. I've assembled a few entries from chapter 2 of his "First Journal of Concrete Music" (1948–1949) along with chapters 3–5, and for the sake of continuity, I've kept longer passages, rather than chop out little key bits. There's a lot of discussion here that might be oblique (especially references to composers/pieces that you're not familiar with) and it's okay to overlook those. Mostly, I want you to focus on the bigger picture ideas relating to practice and form.

With our foundational work out of the day, we'll spend next week taking a quick tour through American poetry from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, tracing the development of the American voice.

In light of today's Cage discussion . . .

Wednesday, Jan. 21: — Foundations 3: de Saussure / Kristeva / Barthes

Roland Barthes cultivating an air of disaffected intellectual coolness.

I've put all of our readings for Wednesday in one PDF, which you can find here. They are taken from the first edition of A Critical and Cultural Study Reader, ed. Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan.

As has been the case with our other foundations classes, these readings are significantly more complex and theoretical than the majority of the work we'll be doing this term, but if you're able to keep with them, particularly through our class discussions, you'll have a strong body of critical tools with which to begin the rest of that work. Do your best to navigate them, using the pointers below, and don't worry if you're not feeling 100% sure of what you've read (or 70% for that matter). What's most important is that you've made an effort and have digested some of the ideas at play here — we'll work quickly to figure out the rest in our class discussion.

We'll be leapfrogging quickly from reading to reading, and I might even set a timer to keep us on schedule so we can get through everything.  

things to look out for:

• de Saussure: definitions of the sign/signifier/signified; general defining characteristics of language; 
• Barthes (from Mythologies): first and second order signification

(note: these readings are being provided as groundwork to set up the other readings by Kristeva and Barthes)

• Kristeva: definitions of phenotext vs. genotext; "poetic language"
• Barthes (from The Pleasure of the Text): definitions of pleasure vs. bliss

Take notes as you read(!) and try to jot down some rudimentary answers to these questions, and you'll be well-positioned for us to start unpacking these ideas. Also, try to look for connections to some of the texts we've already read this semester. Finally, take heart! We begin looking at poetry after one more foundations class!

Your Sound Snippets for Wednesday

Friday, Jan. 16 — Foundations 2: John Cage

One version of the score for 4'33", Cage's most (in)famous composition.

I like to think of my life as being divided into two eras — BC (before Cage) and AC (after Cage) — and for me that division came when I accidentally stumbled upon Michael Nyman's classic Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974) in my college library.  Certainly, I'm not alone in this; Cage is a figure of such monumental, groundbreaking ideas that his influence transcends boundaries of genre, not unlike Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol.  Many of the poets we'll be reading this term have been shaped by Cage's music and his writings, and so it's fitting to spend a little time with him.

Alex Ross, "Searching for Silence: John Cage's Art of Noise" (n.b. this is a good introduction to Cage, but I'd prefer our student respondents focus on Cage's own writings rather than report on this)

from Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961)

• "Lecture on Nothing"
• "Experimental Music"

from A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (1967)

• "How to Kick, Pass, Fall, and Run"

Cage performs 4'33" in Harvard Square in 1976


the BBC Symphony Orchestra performs the piece in 2004 (read more about it here)


Cage talks about silence in a 1991 interview

Postscript: read about a 2010 campaign to make Cage's 4'33" the X-Mas #1 single in Britain

Postscript 2: consider Aram Saroyan's © 1968 by Aram Saroyan as a sort of textual analogue to Cage's 4'33".  Already known for his hyper-minimalist poetry, this book — which consisted of a standard ream of typing paper stamped with a copyright notice and price ($2) — takes that concept to its most extreme permutation.  Read more about it and view a copy here.

Wednesday, Jan. 14: Foundations 1: Perspectives on Listening

We'll begin our work for the semester with two short essays that will offer a few general perspectives on modes of listening, the sounds that surround us.

• Michel Chion, "The Three Listening Modes"
• R. Murray Schafer, "The Soundscape"

These are both excerpts from larger works, and are fairly complexly interwoven with all sorts of contextual allusions that might not be familiar to you — try to ignore that and focus on distilling a few salient points from each essay. Our class discussion will help to fill in the gaps.

Additionally, I'd like everyone to take part in a collaborative audio experiment that will serve as one focus of discussion for Wednesday's class.  For this, you'll need to either download the SoundCloud app for your phone or use the SoundCloud site to record a short snippet of sound:

1. You'll record a ten second audio clip at a time that corresponds to your birthday (mine is May 17th, so that'll be 5:17 — choose AM or PM by whatever's most convenient for you). Record whatever's around you wherever you are at that time.
2. Follow the necessary steps to upload the track to SoundCloud and give it a title that includes your name and the words "Sound Snippet Experiment." Tag it with "PSMP-Spring2015" as well.
3. I'll put together a playlist from the class sounds for us to use on Wednesday.

Please make sure that you've recorded and uploaded your ten second clip by the end of the day Tuesday.

Welcome to Poetry: Sound, Media, and Performance

This is the second time this course has been offered and I'm very excited to get the opportunity to teach it again because the work is so near and dear to my heart, my editorial work, and my poetic practice. I hope that you'll be excited about the work as well, and better still that this course will be useful and rewarding to you — even if it might be intimidating at times (or often) — because our success will largely be a product of your efforts to engage with our readings. While it's officially listed as Poetry and Sound, its fuller name is Poetry: Sound, Media, and Performance, and that name change is an attempt to more faithfully encapsulate the full scope of the areas we'll be investigating this term.

Because this course is a work-in-progress, it's organized in a somewhat organically ramshackle fashion, and it's possible that our schedule might change depending on the shape of our inquiry over the course of the semester (or if we wind up getting hit with a half-dozen snow days). On the bright side, you don't have to buy any books!

Poetry and sound should seem like natural complements, however that's not often been the case until the recent past, with the written text being given primacy over any sonic or performative aspects. Nonetheless, so much of what we recognize as the hallmarks of poetry — set meter, rhythmic feet, and rhyme — are sonic phenomena, and more importantly the reasons why the genre survived and thrived prior to the inventing of the printing press: all of these things serve as mnemonic devices, facilitating the memorization and passing down of texts during epochs when the majority of people couldn't read or write. Still, we won't be covering topics like the rudiments of poetic meter — which you can read all about here — so fear not, you won't have to count beats or know how to tell a trochee from an iamb.

So what will we be studying? We'll start with a few foundational classes covering the basics of sound studies and semiotics, as well as some of the groundbreaking ideas put forth by composer (and poet) John Cage before moving into a number of units (some lasting just one day, some stretching out for two or three weeks), including the interaction between poetry and musical forms, compositional processes influenced by media and technology, poetry in performance, and a number of authors who reduce (or deconstruct) poetry to its most fundamental sonic rudiments. You'll also learn a little about editing and recording sound, and will have two assignments where you'll be handing in audio in addition to written essays.

While some of these ideas and readings might be challenging or confusing, we'll work together to overcome the "shock of the new" and in the process expand your poetic horizons.