On Poetry+ Questions. Due 10/13/16 @ 11:30 am
So as I mentioned in the email I sent around, it looks as if a good theme for our chapbook is Constraint where constraint is always also highlighting the nature of freedom and movement. I think the project will be richest if we really push ourselves to think about the various ways the black literary tradition explores, challenges, and plays with both the theme of constraint and the actual constraints of genre and language. Constraints can show up in all kinds of ways: Physical (i.e. handcuffs); political (i.e. obstacles to suffrage); cultural (taboos against sleeping in public spaces or sitting in the supermarket floor); and more or even a combination of various types of constraints (i.e. discursive, cultural, psychological, and physical constructs of proper gender expression). And or course language rules (i.e. grammar) are also always a form of constraint.
While I think poetry and the chapbook is an excellent form for engaging and exploring this theme, my biggest concern reading the check in sheets is that we take seriously both the form of the chapbook as a whole but also the form of the individual poem. A fair number of us said that we could use poems to tell stories or easily communicate a message. It is not that poems do not tell stories or communicate messages, but so do other genres of writing. Indeed some would say narrative forms of novels and short stories are better suited to telling stories and essays, speeches, and sermons better suited to conveying messages. Moving forward I think it’s imperative for us to think about what poetry is/what it does, and particularly what it is and has done in black tradition. For class on Thursday, October 13th, please read/listen the following brief articles /sound clips and answer the below questions (please submit your responses to the questions below to me via email by 11:30 am on Thursday, 10/13/16). Please remember that you should also be considering the questions about performance and distribution of labor posed in the email updates.
READ
Lorde, Audre. “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” Posted on On Being. Ed. Krista Tippett. July 23, 2015. OnBeing.Org
Pdf copy available via Vanderbilt University
“What is Poetry?” Poetry.Org (Borrowed from Wikipedia)
ya Salaam, Kalamu. “Black Poetry Text & Sound: Two Trains Running: Black Poetry 1965-2000 (notes towards a discussion & dialogue).” Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary and Artistic African-American Themes. Accessed 10/10/2016.
Yakich, Mark. “What is a Poem?: You Read it: It Reads You. An Object Lesson.” The Atlantic. November 25, 2013
LISTEN
Philip, NourbeSe M. “M. NourbeSe Philip reads “Discourse on the Logic of Language” from She Tries Her Tongue.” YouTube.com February 5, 2011.
LISTEN &/or READ
Alexander, Elizabeth. “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe.” Quoted in Popova, Maria. “Elizabeth Alexander on What Poetry Does for the Human Spirit.” Brain Pickings. BrainPickings.org Accessed 10/10/2016.
Doty, Mark. “Tides of Voices: Why Poetry Matters Now.” Poets.Org. March 9, 2010.
- Summarize Audre’s Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” Explain how it might help us think about the ways in which the form of poetry and the form of a chapbook might speak to black literary tradition.
- How do NourbSe Philip’s poem and Elizabeth Alexander’s poem affect what you think writing poetry for an end project might allow us to do? In particular how might poetry allow us to explore the tensions between constraint and movement in black tradition particularly as it shows up in some of your more specific interests in mass incarceration, in growth and decay, and in the incommensurability of blackness and the social constructs of “femininity,” “nation,” and specifically “American”?
- We have only read one poem for this class thus far, and we didn’t get to talk about it much. Still poetry has been to some degree a part of all three of our major readings. How have poetry and the poetic featured in the black women’s writings we’ve read thus far?
- PICK ONE OF THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS
- According to poet M. NourbeSe Philip, poetry is “language under pressure.” Find a passage from one of our readings that seems fairly straight forward but nevertheless compelling to you. Take that passage and put pressure on the language. Decide to render it with no “e”s or to put it in meter. Or to relay it only with verbs. You should have some reason for the particular set of constraints you put on the language.
- According to poet Fred Moten, poetry gets at the “ineffable” and the “irreducible materiality” of blackness and social life. Pick something from our previous readings and/or discussion that could not be spoken or quite gotten at? I am asking you to look for what is felt but can’t be said; how might poetry get at this thing/notion/experience that can’t quite be explained or fully known in words. Where might poetry be of use?