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Thursday, June 22, 2006
Syllabus Bleg: Poetry & Social Crisis
As her name suggests, The Little Womedievalist lives in the sparsely populated academic “ghetto” known as “medieval studies.” (A wonderful place to visit, but I didn’t want to live there.) Thing is, when medievalists tip-toe into the 15th Century, they’re often paralyzed by the unfamiliar literary landscape. “Whither my rigid poetic forms? And feudalism! What have you people done with feudalism?” Medievalists are confused, nay, mortified by the shiny baubles and the steam which periodically issues from them.
So sometimes they need us soon-to-be-unemployed/forever-unemployable modern-types after all, like when they want to write a syllabus on “The Poetry of Crisis.” Below the fold you’ll find The Little Womedievalist’s skeletal syllibi. Lots of war, lots of plague. The word “pandemic” appears no less than seventeen times.
She’d appreciate any advice that’ll help her “flesh it out.” (O how quickly our dead metaphors are enlivened!)
Here (in no particular order) are the topics she wants to address:
Irish potato famine
WWII
Vietnam War
Influenza pandemic of 1918
Revolutionary War
French Revolution (poems written in English)
AIDS pandemic
Cold War/ Communist Scare/ McCarthy
States of anarchy/ regime changes
Great Depression (I only have Agee and Evans so far…)
Current “war on terror”/ Iraq/ Afghanistan/ post-9/11
Any other major political/social/religous crises
Here is what she has so far:
Weeks 1 – 3 (Social and political crises)
William Blake - “The Tyger,” ; Selections from Prophet Against Empire (David Erdman)
Middle English Plowman poems
Agee and Evans, selections from “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”; background reading on the Great Depression
“Tax Hath Tenet Us Alle” (Short ME macaronic poem)
“Introduction” from The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. and intro by Jon Silkin (on reserve). [Though we won’t be covering all of the poets discussed in Silkin’s intro, this will outline a number of the critical questions and issues we want to ask about the poems we will be reading during weeks 4 and 5.]
Weeks 4 & 5 (War, Rebellion, Unrest, Protest)
Michael Drayton, “The Battle of Agincourt” (ERP 261)
Milton, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” (Background Reading.)
Yeats – “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”
Melville – “The Portent,” “Shiloh”
Walt Whitman – “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” “Twenty-eight Young Men Bathed By the Shore,” selections from “Drum Taps”
Thomas Hardy – “Drummer Hodge,”
Wilfred Owen – “Dulce et Decorum Est,”
Siegfried Sassoon –
Charles Hamilton Sorley – “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead”
Edward Thomas – “A Private”
Weeks 6 & 7 (Pandemics, Poverty and Famine; mortality & carpe diem poems)
Lydgate
Thomas Nashe – “In time of plague,” “Autumn Hath all the Summer’s Fruitful Treasure”
Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
The AIDS pandemic – the poetic response
The 1918 Influenza pandemic, and poetic response
The Irish Potato Famine, and poetic response
Weeks 8 & 9 (Crises of conscience)
Fulke Greville
John Donne (esp. the Holy Sonnets)
Emily Dickinson – From “Time and Eternity,” “TO know just how he suffered would be dear” (XIX), “I ’VE seen a dying eye” (XV),
Robert Browning – “Caliban upon Setibos”
Week 10 (Formal crises)
Sidney, “In Defense of Poesie”
Advise away! C’mon! You know you love nothing more than poking holes in other people’s syllabi. Normally all that effort goes for naught. Here, you have a chance to make a difference. Go for it! What are you waiting for? Act now before your influence expires!
Comments
So much you could add! You definitely need some Romantics in there: responses to the Age of Revolutions like Blake’s Vision of the Daughters of Albion, or his Exeprience poems; responses to Peterloo like Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy. You also need the Waste Land. Everybody always needs the Waste Land.
All in English? This is kind of fun…
War, rebellion, protest, social unrest &c: Wordsworth “French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement”; Geoffrey Hill, “September Song”; Dylan Thomas “A Refusal to Mourn the death by Fire of a Child in London”; Allen Ginsberg “Howl”; Randall Jarrell “The Truth”; HD “Trilogy” (The Walls Do Not Fall?); Keith Douglas, “How To Kill”; Muriel Rukeyser “The Dead”; Les Murray “The Conquest”
The AIDS pandemic: Thom Gunn, “Lament”; Mark Doty, “Atlantis”
Crises: The Pisan Cantos? Hopkins, “Not, I’ll not, carrion Comfort...”
Easter, 1916
and
September 1, 1939
Adam, the Romantics are one of the areas she and I are particularly weak in. I recommended Blake’s “The Tiger,” via Erdman’s reading in Prophet Against Empire, but that was about all the solid I could muster. Keep ‘em coming in, seriously, since we’re looking for volume at this point. (Need to cull from the appropriate the germane which, sadly, won’t be pedagogically valuable.)
Alison, it need not be all English, as she’s allowed one work in translation. So far though, the list is all in English. She’s thought about some of the classics, but hasn’t nailed any down. I also recommended Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead” and some Gunn, but I couldn’t pinpoint which poem in The Man With Nightsweats would work best. Thanks for the suggestion of something other than the title poem.
Laura, I smack my forehead in utter embarrassment. Yes yes yes, “Easter, 1916” and “September 1, 1939.” To paraphrase myself: I am become dumb, only now again.
One work in translation? Maybe Horace, _Epode_ 7.
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year
Or maybe Celan, Todesfugue.
Excellent-- thanks to all for the great suggestions so far. Another question for the early modernist readers: Would it be too ambitious to include some of Dekker’s poetic attempts (for lack of a better term) in the syllabus? I won’t argue for quality, but I do give the man props for making plague entertaining and even somewhat amusing…
Edwin Muir, The Estate of Poetry:
http://www.socialit.org/excerpts2.html
(scroll to 1962)
Poets Against War:
http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/
1915 Upton Sinclair, Ed.
The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest [updated 1996]
The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry (Hardcover) by Arnold Rampersad (Editor), Hilary Herbold (Editor)
Claude McKay
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/mckay/mckay.htm
His Dover Thrift edition book is very good, and only a dollar
News From Little Rock (with links)
http://www.freeindiamedia.com/poetry/25_oct_05_poetry.htm
W. H. Auden “The Unknown Citizen”
Eduardo Galeano “Nobodies”
Gloria Anzaldua “Horse” (para la gente de Hargill, Texas)
Joy Harjo “For Anna Mae Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here in the Dappled Stars”
Gary Soto The Elements of San Joaquin
winner of the 1976 United States Award of the International Poetry Forum
a number of powerful migrant labor poems, including “Daybreak”:
In this moment when the light starts up
In the east and rubs
The horizon until it catches fire,
We enter the fields to hoe,
Row after row, among the small flags of onion,
Waving off the dragonflies
That ladder the air.
And tears the onions raise
Do not begin in your eyes but in ours,
In the salt blown
From one blister into another;
They begin in knowing
You will never waken to bear
The hour timed to a heart beat,
The wind pressing us closer to the ground.
When the season ends,
And the onions are unplugged from their sleep,
We won’t forget what you failed to see,
And nothing will heal
Under the rain’s broken fingers.
Also,
Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press by Martin Espada (Editor)
and
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness by Carolyn Forche (Editor)
and Forche’s own poetry
...
I’d recommend Kenneth Fearing’s work from the Depression.
And Michael S. Harper’s volume *Debridement*, which has long poem sequences about war: John Brown and black Vietnam vets. (Yusef Komunyacaa also has some brilliant Vietnam poetry.)
I love Barrett Watten’s *Bad History: A Counter-Epic of the Gulf War*.
Check out Jeremy Cronin’s prison poetry from South Africa. Breyten Breytenbach also has some powerful Apartheid-era poetry.
[Rita Barnard has written excellent studies of both Kenneth Fearing and Cronin.]
I’d recommend the Heinemann Book of African Poetry for a wide array of anglophone verse on various crises in pre- and post-colonial Africa.
If you can find the poetry of M. NourbeSe Philip, he’s written some powerful stuff on the Zong massacre in the 18th century. And Amiri Baraka’s *Whys* series has some great work.
Myung Mi Kim’s *Commons* does a great job of giving us a global perspective on social crisis today. And Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s *Dictee* does as well.
Finally, I’d check out some of the political and war poetry of Robert Duncan. His mystical/progressive vision would work well with folks like Blake and Langland.
And how can we forget about *Howl* and *Kaddish*? Even if the New Left ruined America and made us all work at Starbucks and go to grad school and get tenure and have total job security.
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