“AMARE SINASM”
“A MERRY CANISM”
“A LMER IN CAN ISM”
“A MARR CAN ISM”
 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

The Word (Le Mot)
1975
9 color slides, 5 color photographs

Radical poetic practice in 20th century and contemporary American poetry is marked by ruptured and multiply attenuated ethno-national and linguistic displacements.  This seminar explores poetic practices that tend the conjunctural, chiasmatic, and transitive.  We study the work of poets who problematize and animate transhistorical, heterocultural, and translingual consciousness.

Here's a brief glimpse at some of the underlying concerns of the course:   a critique of the ideology of monolingualism; non-teleological frames for tracking the movements, schools, affiliations that inform the innovative tradition in 20th century American poetry (e.g., experimental modernist women poets, objectivists, Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, diasporic avant-garde American poetry); renegotiating such notions as documentary poetry, standard and non-standard language practice, and cultural materialist poetics.

The course will unfold in four movements, guided by but not bound to chronology.  The texts mentioned below are indicative (rather than definitive) of the reading list:

I.          Zukofsky, 80 Flowers, Prepositions, the Catullus translations.  Stein, essays on “grammar, punctuation, composition” and so on, The Geographical History of America.  Williams, In the American Grain, Man-Orchid, an unfinished collaborative novel.

II.        Amiri Baraka, Olson, Olson-Creeley, The Mayan Lettes.  Robert Duncan: here I'm particularly interested in how we as a class might work with the Duncan Archive housed at The Poetry/Rare Books Room.

III.             Barbara Guest, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian.  The first iteration of ethnopoetics, for example, Alcheringa, Vol. 1, #1, Autumn 1970.

IV.       Susan Howe.  Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing, Song of the Andoumboulu. Mackey and Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERsations.  Brathwaite, The History of the Voice, Rosmarie Waldrop.  Current iterations of ethnopoetics.  Cecilia Vicuna.  Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's multimedia, installation, and film work.

Prefatory and theoretical groundwork includes readings on the history of American linguistics, especially, missionary linguistics.  Whitman, Primer.  Walter Mignolo, Local Histories, Global Designs:Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking.  Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities.  Nancy, Being Singular Plural.  Glissant, The Poetics of Relation.

Basic requirements:  weekly responses with emphasis on close readings of primary texts, a series of short/interrelated class presentations, and a seminar paper.