What is literature? [And why bother?]

In preparation for writing your own essay in response to some version* of the question--what is literature and what is it for?--we have been reading and will continue to read several works that explore this question.

Work for this unit...
1. By class time (not pumpkin time) on Wednesday, February 4 write a "What is literature? [And why bother?]" comment. Respond thoughtfully to a thread of discussion from class, or respond a particular comment by a peer, or respond to a particular passage in one of the readings, or compare passages in more than one of the readings that seem similar or contradictory or in some other way thought provoking. Or, you could respond directly to the questions: what is literature and why bother? Or you could respond to one or more of the questions I have written below--at the end of each reading--to provoke thought. Responses should be 300 words or so in length. Be bold. Be thoughtful. Delve into some uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. Be clear as you can be. Be specific.

2. By class time (not pumpkin time) on Thursday, February 5 read "How to Tell a True War Story" (if you would prefer an ink and paper copy please let me know), mark three passages for discussion, write two questions, and write a summary/response. Do not post these notes. Bring them to class on Thursday. On Thursday I will break the reading down into sections for which certain students will be responsible.

3. By pumpkin time on Friday, February 6 write another thoughtful comment (300 words or so in length) on the blog. End your comment with the question or questions you will explore in your "Literature? Essay". (Refer to the questions below and above in the title line if they help.)

4. A complete 1000-2000 word draft (which will be graded but weighted as a homework assignment rather than as an essay) is due on Friday, February 13 by pumpkin time. (What could go wrong on Friday the thirteenth?)


Here is a list of the works we have and will read related to the big question. Below you'll also find links to related resources.

1. Read for Tuesday, January 26. "Jabberwocky" a personal essay by Barabara Kingsolver (re: how does fiction help teach empathy, especially empathy for "others," i.e. people with a different point of view? how is teaching empathy inherently politically? )

2. Read for Thursday, January 28. "Keynote Speech at the First Pearl River Poetry Conference, Guagzhou, P.R. China, 28th June 2005" a speech by J.H. Prynne (re: what is the role of the poet, especially with regard to language and truth?; re: what is the nature of poetic language?)

3. Read for Monday, February 2. "What is Literature?" (the first chapter of Literary Theory) by Terry Eagleton
This is a webpage that might help with "What is Literature?" (re: how is literature different from other forms of writing?)

4. Read on Friday, January 30 in F-block. Read on Tuesday, February 3 in D-block. "Negative Capability" LETTER from John Keats to his brothers. (And here's another website about "Negative Capability". This one includes an excerpt from another letter: "poetical character... has no self- it is everything and nothing- it has no character and enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated- it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion [sic] Poet... A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually filling some other body" (re: how is the way a creative writer knows different from the way a critic, a philosopher, a scientist knows? how is dwelling within mysteries and uncertainties part of the creative process? how is being open to "others" part of the creative process?)

5. Read for Thursday, February 5. "How to Tell a True War Story" from The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (re: how can fiction convey truth "better" than a "true" story?)

6. Optional reading. John Gardner's letter to AP students at a Bennington, VT high school & an excerpt from John Gardner's On Moral Fiction: "...the writing of fiction is a mode of thought. No one can achieve profound characterization of a person (or place) without appealing to semi-unconscious associations. To sharpen or intensify a characterization, a writer makes use of metaphor and reinforcing background--weather, physical objects, animals--details which either mirror character or give character something to react to. To understand that Marlon Brando is a certain kind of weather is to discover something (though something neither useful nor demonstrable) and in the same instant to communicate something. Thus one of the ways in which fiction thinks is by discovering deep metaphoric identities." (re: how does a creative writer use mysterious, unconscious associations and correspondences to explore truth?)

7. Optional reading: from Eduardo Galeano's Century of the Wind here is an excerpt: "The poet [Pablo Neruda], distracted by politics, asks of poetry that it make itself useful like metal or flour, that it get ready to stain its face with coal dust and fight body to body." (re: of what use is literature (of what use are the arts) in political struggles?)

8. Optional reading: from Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners here is an excerpt: "When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully." (re: How is literature's meaning embodied? How is literature's meaning experienced?)

_______
* You will write your own question related to these. Any such question contextual. None is the "right" question.

Citing Translations (I made a mistake!)

Here's how to cite translations. (In F-block when Alex R asked if the author and translator went inside the same period a slight pinprick in the back of my head singled that I was heading into folly but I blundered ahead anyway. The pinprick nagged at me so I spent a few minutes digging around MLA format and I found this.)

Original author's last name, first name. Title of book in which the poem appears. Trans. Translator's first name Translator's last name. Publishing City: Publisher, Publication Date.
*
Example
Dostoevsky, Feodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Jessie Coulsen. New York: Norton, 1964.
*
All with a hanging indentation.

Works Cited

I've put in bold where I've cited an album and where I've cited an unpublished manuscript. (None of the poems I used came from the internet so if you need help with internet citation consult The Compass, the MLA handout in the library, or the MLA Handbook also in the library.)

Abrams, M. H. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Fifth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987.

Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Cardenal, Ernesto. Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems. New York: New Directions, 1980.

Clements, A. L. ed. John Donne’s Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966.

Codrescu, Andrei, ed. Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1989.

Conrad, C.A. Deviant Propulsion. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2006.

Cook, James W., ed. Polis 1. Gloucester, MA: The Polis Arts Alliance, 2002.

Cook, James William. Arguments & Letters. Gloucester, MA: Unpublished Manuscript, 2004.

Cook, James William. Some Arguments. Somerville, MA: Openmouth Press, 2005.

Cook, James William. The Fool. Gloucester, MA: Unpublished Manuscript, 2008.

Cornish, Sam. 1935: A memoir. Boston: Ploughshare Books, 1990.

Creeley, Robert. The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-1975. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Depestre, René. A Rainbow for the Christian West. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.

Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1961.

García Lorca, Federico. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947-1980. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988.

Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Random House, Inc., 1990.

Levertov, Denise. O Taste and See. New York: New Directions, 1964.

McKim, Musa. Alone With The Moon: Selected Writings of Musa McKim. Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1994.

Niedecker, Lorine. The Granite Pail. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1996.

Notley, Alice. Mysteries of Small Houses. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

Olson, Charles. Charles Olson, Selected Writings. New York: New Directions, 1966.

Phillips, J.J., Ishmael Reed, Gundars Strads, and Shawn Wong, eds. The Before Columbus Foundation Poetry Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Rich, Dave and Lisa Rich, eds. Process. Gloucester, MA: Cod Bank Press, 2008.

Simic, Charles ed. The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1992.

The Clash. “Straight to Hell.” Combat Rock. Epic Records, 1982.

The Pogues. “Fairytale of New York.” If I Should Fall from Grace with God. Island Records, Inc., 1988.

Wieners, John. Selected Poems, 1958-1984. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1986.

Williams, William Carlos. William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1985.

Finding Twenty-First Century Poems...

Here is SUNY-Buffalo's list of print and web poetry magazines. The page has hyperlinks to the magazines themselves.

Jacket is one of my favorite online poetry magazines. It's based in Australia but includes poems and essays on poetry from around the world. (Lots of USAmerican poems and prose.) This page shows the contents of every Jacket, issues 1 through 35. The page also has a search link. Using the search link I looked for poems containing miscellaneous theme-words and I had found some interesting and relevant essays and poems.

This page set up by the Poetry Foundation might help too. It has links to poems organized by "category".

Poems from the end of the twentieth century can be used in this category.

Examples: Cover, Introduction, and Table of Contents

[Cover page]

“Stating the Case of the Underdog”:

Protest Songs, Laments, Documentary Poems, Blues, Cante Jondo, and so on

James Cook

Elizabeth Johnson Tsang

College Board AP Institute:

AP Literature and Composition

July 28, 2008

*******

[Introduction]

Introduction: Under and Below, Down and Out, Black and Blue

Strangely, it was while reading a Ford Maddox Ford quotation about Jean Rhys’s first novel that I came upon the theme of this poetry anthology. Francis Wyndham quotes Ford as writing that Rhys demonstrates “a terrifying instinct and a terrific—an almost lurid!—passion for stating the case of the underdog.” Wyndham goes on to write that without what Ford calls “a singular instinct for form” Rhys’s work might become bathetic: “sentimental or sensational.” Conversely, without the unflinching moral depiction of the downtrodden the formal acuity might seem superficial, no more than a shiny trinket. However, by championing the underdog—by revealing the underdog—with a fine (and innovative) sense of the novelist’s art (especially narration and characterization) Rhys produced “original art” that is both “exquisite and deeply disturbing.”

I hope these poems live up to Rhys’s fiction. All of the poems might be said to “state the case of the underdog.” The forms, however, are quite diverse.

Some poems are laments (“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” “I reason, Earth is short,” “Jim Dunn’s Eviction”). Some are blues (“Blues at Dawn” and “This Morning I Have Got to Keep Moving”). Some are deep songs, cantes jondos, possessed by duende. (Federico García Lorca wrote, “The duende…is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. [I]t is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.”)

At least one poem is a wound (“Billie”). Another is an ache (“The ache of Marriage”). Yet another is a meditation on death (“The Fool on the Football Wars”).

There is a Whitmanic song of protest (“Cap’tain Zombi”). And there is an epistolary protest, a kind of prose poem (“Dear Mr. President…”). Some poems are analogous to activist documentary films (“Yiddish Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side,” “Nicaraguan Canto,” “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” “Eugene Delacroix Says,” “Sept 17 / Aug 29, ’88”). Some poems are a combination of critique and witness (“London” and “After Lorca”).

In the anthology there is an ekphrastic poem—a poem responding to visual art (“Sugar Cane”). One piece is a poetic play (“Plumbing”). (Since there are prose poems can there not be play poems?) In another set of poems Vasko Popa employs a speaker who uses the language of children’s games; such games, of course, have losers: “There’s no place he doesn’t look/And looking he loses himself.”

The anthology contains three songs (“Song: Men of England,” “Straight to Hell,” “Fairytale of New York), a protest sonnet (“England in 1819”), and a Donne valediction, a poem of parting with ample characteristic conceits. (The later poem’s private defiance of the sorrowful moment seems analogous in some ways to the public defiance of injustice in the political protest poems within the anthology.)

Among the poems whose lines are liberated from the left margin, there are many variations of William Carlos Williams’ variable foot line and some Olsonian projective verse (“Song 3,” “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” “Nicaraguan Canto,” “Yiddish Speaking Socialists…”). There are poets playing with the net down (CAConrad), poets playing with the net up (Donne, Shelley, Blake), and poets playing with the net (Dickinson and Niedecker).

Poets are makers. (“Poein,” from which “poet” is derived, is classical Greek for “to make.”) And these poems are made of private sorrows and socio-political injustice, of resignation and resilience, of protest and witness, of song and declaration, of chant and moan, of empathy and defiance; all make “cases,” so to speak, for the wounded, the aching, the degraded, the alienated, the downtrodden. These are poems for and of the underdog.

*******
[Table of Contents]

“Stating the Case of the Underdog”:

Protest Songs, Laments, Documentary Poems, Blues, Cante Jondo, and so on

THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL

1. “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” John Donne a 17^th century poem
2. “Song: Men of England,” Percy Bysshe Shelley a 19^th century poem
3. “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” William Carlos Williams a 20^th century poem
4. “England in 1819,” Percy Bysshe Shelley a sonnet
5. “Straight to Hell,” Joe Strummer (performed by The Clash) a song lyric
6. “Sugar Cane,” James William Cook a poem I have written
7. “Jim Dunn’s Eviction,” James William Cook a poem I have written
8. “The Fool on the Football Wars,” James William Cook a poem I have written

WITNESS AND PROTEST

9. “After Lorca,” Robert Creeley
10. “The Songs of Maximus, Song 3” Charles Olson
11. “Eugene Delacroix Says,” Ed Dorn
12. “London,” William Blake
13. “Gloucester Poem,” Amanda Porter
14. from “Nicaraguan Canto,” Ernesto Cardenal, translation Robert Pring-Mill
15. “Yiddish Speaking Socialists of The Lower East Side,” Ed Sanders
16. “Cap’tain Zombi,” René Depestre, translation Joan Dayan
17. from “Wichita Vortex Sutra” Allen Ginsberg
18. “Sept 17 / Aug 29, ’88,” Alice Notley
19. “Dear Mr. President There Was Egg Shell under Your Desk Last Night in My Dream!” CAConrad

BLUES & CANTE JONDO (DEEP SONG)

20. “Confusion,” Federico García Lorca, translation James William Cook
21. “Blues at Dawn” Langston Hughes
22. [301], Emily Dickinson
23. “This Morning I have Got to Keep Moving/Oral Histories and Family Sketches,” Sam Cornish
24. “Valentine’s Day,” CAConrad
25. “Fairytale of New York,” Shane MacGowan (performed by The Pogues)
26. “Plumbing,” Musa McKim
27. “The Ache of Marriage,” Denise Levertov
28. “Billie,” John Wieners
29. [“Who was Mary Shelley?”], Lorine Niedecker

DUENDE IN CHILD’S PLAY

30. from “Games,” Vasko Popa

Note: In case you noticed the directions for the assignment I did this summer were different than the directions I gave to you. So make sure you follow the directions instead of just following what I've done.

Literary Terms

Post definitions and examples in the comments box by pumpkin time on Monday, January 12.

Click here for literary terms.