THE VISUAL IN THE VERBAL, WEEKS 11-13

CUBISM & COLLAGE 

WHAT WE’LL COVER:
This week we'll look at two specific translations of modern art technique into verbal technique: cubism and collage. Cubism is a way of seeing a concrete object in multiple views simultaneously. It makes the concrete partially abstract. "Cubism" is also used more loosely to describe the abstract imagery in a wide variety of modern and contemporary poem. Williams, for example, wrote a variety of poems drawing on modern art's ways of seeing. Long arguments may be enjoyed as to which of these poems is, strictly speaking, "cubist." We probably won't have those arguments, but we will read some of the poems. We'll also read more recent poems by John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, who continue the conversation between poetic and painterly abstraction, and by Harryette Mullen, who responds to Stein.

Collage imports found materials into a painting (or poem) and puts them to a new use while retaining our awareness of their original  This can take place on a large scale, as when Williams "pastes in" pieces of local history in his long poem, Paterson, or on a small scale, as when Moore "pastes in" bits of her reading or her mother's conversation. "Collage" can also be used to describe methods of composition that juxtapose bits of language together in a manner that resembles actual collage, though everything in the poem was written by the poet. We will look at both kinds of collage and at cubist poems ranging from Stein's fully abstract Tender Buttons to Stevens' blackbird.

READING: POEMS:

Cubism:

Stein: Picasso MODERN 178, Tender Buttons MODERN 180 (browse around in these poems & choose a favorite), Susie Asado 185, Guillaume Apollinaire MODERN 186, Preciosilla MODERN 186

Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird MODERN 244, Domination of Black MODERN 243, Study of Two Pears 253

Williams: Portrait of a Lady MODERN 289, Queen-Ann's Lace MODERN 290, The Great Figure MODERN 291, Spring and All MODERN 290, Flowers by the Sea MODERN 297, The Botticellian Trees MODERN 297

Moore: The Fish MODERN 436, England MODERN 439, & Those Various Scalpels (on line)

Cummings: begining MODERN 546

O'Hara: Why I Am Not a Painter CONTEMP 369 & poems handed out in class

Ashbery: The Tennis Court Oath CONTEMP 389, Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape CONTEMP 393, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (very long, but introduce yourself to it) CONTEMP 395, Wet Casements 406

Harryette Mullen: from Trimmings & from S*PeRM**K*T, passed out in class (these poems respond to Stein's Tender Buttons)

Collage:

Moore: An Octapus MODERN  441, To a Snail MODERN  446, & New York (on line)

Williams: from Book I of Paterson, MODERN  beginning on 304

Eliot: The Waste Land MODERN 474

Pound: from The Cantos LXXXI MODERN  380  

Jones: from In Parenthesis MODERN 570

Robert Hayden: from Middle Passage, passed out in class

Harryette Mullen: from Muse & Drudge, passed out in class

ONLINE READING

The Quoting Poem