American Women Poets (Poetki amerykańskie)

The course examines the work of American women poets in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, tracing a tradition shaped by its own dynamic and persistent concerns, but also its own debates and conflicts. The aim is to balance a formally rigorous reading of poems (with some attention to poetics and theory of poetic forms) with a cultural and contextualized reading which posits the modalities of class, race and sexuality, as well as gender, as central to the reading of poetry.

The course examines the work of American women poets in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, tracing a tradition shaped by its own dynamic and persistent concerns, but also its own debates and conflicts. Much attention will be given to mutual readings of the women poets—such as, for example, Adrienne Rich’s and Susan Howe’s reading of Emily Dickinson, Denise Levertov’s and Barbara Guest’s reading of H.D., Haryette Mullen’s inspiration with Gertrude Stein, Audre Lorde’s relationship and exchange with Adrienne Rich, etc. We will discuss the position of women in various poetic epochs and “schools” (in Modernism, in the Confessional, Black Mountain, Black Arts or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E schools) and their conspicuous absence from other movements (such as Surrealism or the Beat Generation). We will trace the consolidation of and exchanges within specific groups of women poets, such as lesbian, African American or Latina, examining the importance and difficulty of introducing identity categories (such as “woman,” “lesbian,” “African American”) into our readings of poetry. The aim is to balance a formally rigorous reading of poems (with some attention to poetics and theory of poetic forms) with a cultural and contextualized reading which posits the modalities of class, race and sexuality, as well as gender, as central to the reading of poetry. The poets we may examine are: Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Angelina Weld Grimké, Marianne Moore, Amy Lowell, H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Rita Dove, Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Hariette Mullen, Ana Castillo, Joy Harjo. Some of the critics we will read: Susan Howe, Alicia Ostriker, Annie Finch, Betsy Erkkila, Sabine Sielke, Susan Gubar, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldua.

Emily Dickinson: 709 (“Publication—is the Auction”), 67 (“Success is counted sweetest”), 86 (“South Winds jostle them”), 182 (“If I shouldn’t be alive”), 216 (“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”), 258 (“There’s a certain Slant of light”), 299 (“Your Riches – taught me – Poverty”), 300 (“’Morning’ – means ‘Milking’ – to the Farmer”), 307 (“The One who could repeat the Summer day”), 308 (“I send Two Sunsets”), 318 (“I’ll tell you how the Sun rose”), 321 (“Of all the Sounds dispatched abroad”), 324 (“Some keep the Sabbath by going to Church”), 341 (“After a great pain, a formal feeling comes”), 375 (“The Angle of a Landscape”), 410 (“The first Day’s Night had come”), 412 (“I read my sentence – steadily”), 421 (“A Charm invests a face”), 441 (“This is my letter to the World”), 465 (“I heard a Fly buzz – when I died”), 470 (“I am alive – I guess”), 494 version 1 and 2 (“Going to Him! Happy letter!”), 505 (“I would not paint – a picture”), 613 (“They shut me up in Prose”), 657 (“I dwell in Possibility”), 712 (”Because I could not stop for Death”), 742 (“Four Trees — upon a solitary Acre”), 797 (“By my Window I have for Scenery”), 812 (“A Light exists in Spring”), 985 (“The Missing All – prevented Me”), 1129 (“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”), 1212 (“A word is dead”), 1261 (“A Word dropped careless on a Page”)

T.W. Higginson on the correspondence with Dickinson (until winter 1862/3): http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1891/10/emily-dickinsons-letters/306524/

The Dickinson manuscripts at: http://www.edickinson.org/

Marianne Moore: “Poetry,” “The Fish,” “Sojourn in the Whale,” “A Grave,” “Silence,” “Marriage,” “An Octopus,” “No Swan so Fine,” “The Paper Nautilus,” “Spenser’s Ireland,” “Peter,” “The Past is the Present,” “The Steeple Jack”

Elizabeth Bishop, from “Efforts of Affection”

Angelina Weld Grimkè: “Trees,” “The Eyes of My Regret,” “Rosabel,” “You,” “Naughty Nan,” “At April,” “A Winter Twilight,” “For the Candle Light,” “When the Green Lies over the Earth,” “Tenebris,” “The Black Finger,” “A Mona Lisa”

Amy Lowell: “Aubade, “Decade,” “Interlude,” “The Garden by Moonlight,” “Madonna of the Evening Flowers,” “Autumn,” “Taxi,” “Carrefour,” “Venus Transiens,” “White Currants,” “In Excelsis” (all poems online at: http://www.poemhunter.com/amy-lowell/poems/ )

H.D.: “Helen,” “The Master,” “Pursuit,” “Eurydice,” “Oread,” “Fragment Thirty-six”

Denise Levertov, “H.D.: An Appreciaiton”

H.D. “The Walls Do not Fall,” from Trilogy

Susan Stanford Friedman, “When a ‘Long’ Poem Is a ‘Big’ Poem: Self-Authorizing Strategies in Women’s Twentieth-Century ‘Long Poems’”

Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him,” from “Lifting Belly,”

Elisabeth Bishop: “The Map,” “Large Bad Picture,” “The Man-Moth,” “Quai d’Orleans,” “Florida,” ”Brazil, January 1, 1502,” “Questions of Travel,” “Sestina,” “Filling Station,” “Crusoe in England,” “One Art”

Betsy Erkkila, “Differences that Kill: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore”

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Denise Levertov: “Hypocrite Women,” “In Mind,” “ The Ache of Marriage,” “About

Marriage,” “The Wings,” “Stepping Westward,” “Olga Poems,” “A Note to Olga,” “During the Eichman Trial”

Gwendolyn Brooks: “kitchenette building,” “ We Real Cool,” “The Bean Eaters,”

“The Children of the Poor,” “The Lovers of the Poor,” “ Sadie and Maud,” “a song in the front yard”

Audre Lorde: “Power,” “ The Art of Response,” “ Stations,” “Coal,” “On a Night of the Full

Moon,” “Now that I Am Forever with Child,” “From the House of Jemanja,” “Coniagui Women,” “The Women of Dan Dance with Swords in Their Hands to Mark the Time When They Were Warriors,” “Never Take Fire from a Woman”; essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (at: http://freeagencyalways.blogspot.com/2006/07/poetry-is-not-luxury.html)

Harryette Mullen: from Sleeping with a Dictionary (“All She Wrote,” “The Anthropic Principle,” “Any Lit,” “Ask Aden,” “Between,” “Bilingual Instructions,” Black Nikes,” “Blah-Blah,” “Bleeding Hearts,” “Bolsa Algodon,” “Coals to Newcastle,” “Coo/Slur,” “Daisy Pearl,” “Denigration,” “Dim Lady” (w/Shakespeare); “Dream Cycle,” “Ectopian,” “Elliptical,” “European Folk Tale Variant,” “Euridice,” “Exploring the Dark Continent,” “Fancy Cortex,” “Free radicals,” “The Gene for Music,” “Hitched to a Star,” “Junk Mail,” “Kamasutra Sutra,” “Kirstenography,” “O. ‘Tis William,” “Variation on a Theme Park”); from Muse and Drudge; essay “The Cracks Between What We Are And What We Are Supposed to Be”

Adrienne Rich: “Storm Warnings,” “Baltimore: A Fragment from the Thirties,” “Delta,” “Planetarium,” “Cartographies of Silence,” “I Am in Danger—Sir—,” “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” “Power,” “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” “Diving into the Wreck,” from “Twenty-One Love Poems,” “Grandmothers,” “Yom Kippur 1984”; essay: “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”

Judy Grahn: “[in the place where],” from “The Common Women”

Susan Howe: from My Emily Dickinson; from Articulation of Sound Forms in Time

Lyn Hejinian: from My Life, essay “The Rejection of Closure.”

Ana Castillo: “Women Don’t Riot” (at: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/castillo/onlinepoems.htm); “I Ask the Impossible,” “On the Meaning of Things” (at: http://anacastillo.com/ac/works/poetry.htm)

Cecilia Vicuña: “Thread of the Voice,” “Five Notebooks for Exit Art”; see Vicuña’s online exhibition at http://www.ceciliavicuna.org/en_exhibition.htm

Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with a Dictionary

Harryette Mullen, “The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be”

Claudia Rankine Citizen. And American Lyric

Tracy Smith

Natasha Threthewey

Knowledge

After completing the course, the student is aware of the influence of the intersection of gender, sexuality and race on the position of the writer. The student recognises gender as an important aspect of social and cultural life. The student can define some of the aspects of social inequality related to gender and is open to the new phenomena and ideas related to women's changing participation in cultural life.

SKILLS

The student can analyse poems, with reference to basic knowledge of poetics, U.S. literature and history. The student can reference selected theories of poetry. The student is able to formulate critical arguments about individual poems and, more broadly, characteristics of the work of each of the poets discussed in the course.

COMPETENCE

After completing the course the student is aware of the influence of the intersection of gender, sexuality and race on social, political, cultural life. The student can be a conscious observer and/or participant in cultural events, readings, meetings, exhibits, and shows related to women and the arts.

Students will be responsible for short written assignments. All assignments will be graded as S/U (Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory). The student's final grade will be based on the number of completed assignments and class participation (or, alternatively, a written response).