This seminar will investigate a few crucial poets whose fracturings and extensions of the line gave liberties to verse and spawned full-blown philosophies of composition and experience. We will concentrate on Emily Dickinson’s quatrains, Stéphane Mallarmé’s balletic essays, Marianne Moore’s syllabics, Ezra Pound’s ideogrammic measures (especially his Cantos), Paul Celan’s compacted fragments, and Frank O’Hara’s improvisations. We might also read Gertrude Stein’s plays, Langston Hughes’s blues emulations, José Lezama Lima’s baroque indirections, and Hart Crane’s crisis-conscious lyrics. The course could well be titled “Crisis of Verse,” after Mallarmé’s essay, in which he observed that the Author was dead. (See also Dickinson’s “Crisis is a Hair / Toward which the forces creep...” Indeed, crisis will be our theme; for traversals of this topic, we may turn to poems by Georg Trakl and Ingeborg Bachmann.) To complete our study of stammering and ellipsis, we may see two films: probably Werner Herzog’s The Mystery of Kasper Hauser and Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. We aim to intensify the acuteness of our listening to the spasms, interruptions, and leaps of patterned, self-aware language. (Works in French, German, and Spanish will be read, in English translations, with close reference to the originals.) Requirement: a final essay, which you may treat as an experiment in prose poetics, involving stylistic deviations, extravagances, and constraints.

From the twelth to the sixteenth century the married estate underwent a profound revaluation. The emphasis on marriage as a sacrament whose core was the consent of its two participants, and the conferring on this conjugal union of much of the signifying power previously reserved for friendship between two men, worked to elevate the lay married estate to a level on par with or even superior to that of the celibate clergy. The newly gendered and sexualized identities of self-controlled husband and good wife, conjoined in one flesh through sacrament and marital affection, not only founded a new household unit but also, to the extent that they showed how such marital relations could act as a systematic guide to a virtuous life, provided a model for civic society dramatically different from previous aristocratic or clerical ones. If by the Early Modern period, these changes had effectively ushered in a new sex/gender system—what we have come to know as modern heterosexuality—by selecting and controlling what and how marriage signified, the late medieval period’s engagement with conjugality remained much more open-ended and conflicted.

This course will consider some of the ways that attempts to represent late medieval conjugality as something “good to think with,” and thus useful in defining and authorizing selfhood for newly emergent groups in that culture, might also mark a certain experimentation with the real that is frequently difficult to align with traditionally normative clerical or chivalric gender roles organized around virginity or noble bloodline. We will begin by considering the legal, theological, and political discourses producing this new emphasis on the value of the married estate in relation to Chretien de Troyes’ romance Eric et Enide. We will consider the variety of conduct literature that developed to regulate and define this new gender system, particularly the wealth of literature related to “the good wife,” her carefully husbanded femininity, and the productive bourgeois household such conjugality makes possible. Here we will consider such works as Le Menagier de Paris and The Knight of La Tour Landry. In particular, we will focus on the enormously popular story of the absolutely patient wife, Griselda, as it travels across Europe. In addition to an important French play version of Griselda, we will consider the English Corpus Christi cycle plays’ depictions of Noah and his Wife, as well as Mary and Joseph. We will conclude with Early Modern assimilations of conjugality within an increasingly patriarchal and heterosexual social system, notably in an early seventeenth century play of Griselda as well as in Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost.

The complex interconnection of poetry and place is what we will consider – how poems evoke place, how identity is bound up with places and how the loss of place can allow for a poetics of dislocation. What happens to identity when the symbolic space of the poem opens up thresholds, in between spaces, perilious disjunctions between places? Through poem cycles and long poems we will explore how poetic language is used to evoke a migratory, diasporic existence, how gender and sexuality are refracted, how traumatic loss, whether of place or language works its way through poetry. We will explore the work of poets of our own time such as Agha Shahid Ali, Marilyn Chin, Joy Harjo , Myung Mi Kim, Li-Young Lee , Nathaniel Mackey and A.K.Ramanujan. We will read Dorothy Wordsworth’s prose journals; William Wordsworth’s 1805 Prelude and his Poems on the Naming of Places, as well as Derek Walcott’s Another Life (1973) a long poem that draws on the The Prelude. We will also read essays by the poets, where these are to be found as well as the work of postcolonial and other theorists – including Appadurai, Agamben, Bauman, Benjamin, Bhabha, Glissant, Merleau-Ponty, Soja . The course will be run as a seminar with weekly presentations on poetry and poetics, one mid term paper and one final research paper.