This is a 15-part lecture series on poetry and poetics. The lectures will be given in English, with readings of poems in English with Spanish translations.

For continuing the dialog, we have a blog at Zapopan Lectures.

The course will be given:

The dates of the lectures are:

The fee for the series is:

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The first four lectures will take us inside the poem and inside the poetic process. These (first four) lectures might seem at first a little more technical to the non-writer but, in addition to talking about how these themes apply to any creative work we do, we’ll be laying the groundwork and a common vocabulary for a dialog about what poetry—what art—is; what the relationship is between poetry and life (our lives); and what it means to make something. And why.

The second six lectures will move into broader themes such as thought & feeling in relation to poems (the poet’s thoughts and feeling, our thoughts and feelings); truth (what we are looking for in poetry, what truth is); subjectivity (what does it mean when the poet writes “I”); and time (the time of the poem, and our time). In these lectures we’ll open up questions about meaning and significance, as well as what it is to be a one, an individual human being.

The last five lectures of this first series will bring us to discuss poetry and our situation: post-industrial capitalism, information technology and exchange, globalization, post-humanism, contemporaneity. Here we will engage the political, the social, and the personal—we’ll engage the human and being human in the world, this world. Which world is that?

The participants in this series will engage in dialog about the poems and issues discussed. The poems will be by poets I consider innovators—those who have done something new in poetry, those who’ve had an impact on the art that follows, hence many other worthy poets will be passed over. At least this time. The readings will be provided.

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The painter Degas said he had ideas for poems—why couldn’t he write poems? Mallarmé replied that a poem is made with words, not ideas.

Language is something we share, it is our common legacy, the medium in which we live and communicate. And think. And feel (can you have a feeling without that feeling coming into consciousness? can there be a you without language?). We use words every day, in communicating, in expressing ourselves, in getting things done—why can’t we write poems?

In the usefulness of daily language, in language as an act of communication, the message may be conveyed, but something is lost in the transmission, something is dispersed into the landscape, of our common life, of our minds.

Walter Benjamin wrote about the ragpicker, the one “whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects.” This, wrote Benjamin, is one extended metaphor for the poet.

The poet keeps a notebook. What is this notebook, what is it that the poet records, makes note of, collects? What are poems made of? What is language?

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“I try one word and another word, reverse the sequence, alter the line-endings, a hundred two hundred rewritings, revisions—This is prosody: how to write a poem”—wrote George Oppen.

And Jack Spicer spoke of poetry as “transmission,” as “dictation,” from the outside, from an “invisible world”—the poet was a crystal set or radio receiving transmissions from outer space, or Mars. Specifically, West Mars.

A poet may begin with the idea of a poem, or a feeling; a poet may begin with poetic material, as for example the stuff of a notebook. From whatever beginning, a poet makes poems—the poem is the end or goal of writing poetry. (Or one end: poets may work in terms of larger structures as well, such as the series, sequence, or cycle—and these may span across many years and many books. And the book is another end of poetry, a constellation of poems in a meaningful relationship.)

What happens from the moment the poet thinks he or she is writing a poem and that moment when they feel the poem is “done”? What is the process of poetry? What is a poem in the context of a series, a book, a corpus, and a life? Why is it that Oppen doesn’t have an idea of what he wants to do when he writes a poem? (A poem is not made with ideas, it’s made with words.)

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We assume that a writer has something to say—does he or she? We assume that there is a content, message, or meaning to a poem, to poetry, and to poetic endeavor—what is meaning? what is poetic endeavor? what is a poem? But while engaging the question of meaning and intention in relation to the art of poetry, we will assume that there is motivation on the part of the individual poet to write, and hence we are going to focus on writing as such, as an art.

We begin with the premise that poetry is first of all an art which uses language as its medium—that is, that poetry is not a thing for ornamenting thoughts, feelings, or sentiment. Hence we’ll be looking into the laws of the art and the techniques of poetry. The emphasis of this lecture, then, is going to be on craft, but not on the traditional sense—this will not be about verse forms (prosody) and poetic language, poetic “images,” or the poetic turn of phrase, but rather about ideas of poetic form and, as Charles Olson wrote,

“FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.”

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This lecture continues the discussion of form, especially of conceptions of “closed form” and “open form,” through the work of Auden and Olson, and in relation to closed and open societies, and ideas of process, non-linearity, and self-organization.

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“The poem is the cry of its occasion,” wrote Wallace Stevens.

What are we? Are we mind, body, soul? Some combination of these parts? Some other kind of whole?

Perhaps it depends on the occasion, the moment we’re asking the question.

In poetry, there are moments of intellectual reaction to chaos and disorder, to volatility and instability. Stevens can be said to be of this moment: the mind thinking through itself, seeking order in the medium of its reality, language.

There are other moments of a visceral reaction against order and conformity, against the madness of reason. Ginsberg is definitely of this moment: the vitality of the whole individual resisting constraint, repression, and fear in the psychic medium of linguistic imagination.

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This lecture continues the discussion about the mind and the body, thought and feeling, and poetry, through the work of Stevens and Ginsberg, and the idea of the occasion in Stevens’s line, “The poem is the cry of its occasion.”

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“I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am,” wrote Sylvia Plath.

And John Ashbery wrote, “My guide in these matters is your self, / Firm, oblique, accepting everything with the same / Wraith of a smile, and as time speeds up so that it is soon / Much later, I can know only the straight way out, / The distance between us.”

When you speak, when you write, how many times do you begin a sentence with the word “I”? Well, it is I who am speaking, I who am writing, but isn’t it odd that the one word that represents my self—I—is the one word I have to share with everyone else?

The “I” of the poet, the “I” of the poem, the “I” of the reader—both Plath and Ashbery write from the poetic I. This is at least a convention of lyric poetry. So, Who is I?

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This lecture continues the discussion about the subjectivity and the I of poetry, through the work of Plath and Ashbery.

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“Period by period the sentences are bound. / Fragments deliverd up / to what celestial timekeeper?” wrote Robert Duncan.

When we read a novel that has our attention, that sucks us in and moves us, we want it to go on forever. A bad novel—we can’t wait for it to be over. Same with movies.

And a poem? When we read a good poem, we want to read it again and again. Its time is more intense—not the duration of fiction, not the continuous flow of life, but the moment of insight, revelation, of primordial memory and the instantaneous recognition of truth. Or, as Frank O’Hara wrote, “Everything / suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of / a Thursday.”

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This lecture continues the discussion about the representation of time and the experience of time in poetry, through the work of O’Hara and Duncan.

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