modernism

Problems are flowers and fade

In philosophy and art humanity is no longer worthy of our enquiry or representation. Philosophy as an attention to human problems must yield to science dealing with mechanical masses of non-human material. The questions of medicine, hygiene and psychology are being relegated gradually to physiology. Art no longer attempts to mirror man, or the things in nature as seen by man, but depicts unrecognisable patterns which are like nothing on earth—lines, cubes, inhuman designs. The art of representing visible likeness is relegated to the science of photography. The philosophies and arts of one age are the exact sciences of the next. Philosophy, searching for what is true, and art, searching for what is new, may be discovered as being always out in front of society, in the vanguard; while the sciences and industries—the more utilitarian and moralistic activities—may be considered as forming the main body of the army, moving into the positions the spearhead establishes. This division of labour is rarely seen operating on a large scale, but viewing the world as a whole it will be seen that the humanism which has inspired so many of the great philosophers and artists of the past is a goal attained. We have arrived at humanity; there is work for science, enormous work—but the vanguard has to look to new goals ahead.Harry Hooton, excerpt from "Problems are Flowers and Fade," from Things You See When You Haven't Got a Gun, self-published booklet, 1943.

Over the last few months, Harry Hooton has been on my mind. His name has been mentioned a number of times as I have progressed through this archival project, and on my first visit to Amanda Stewart's house she lent me a copy of Poet of the 21st Century: Harry Hooton, Collected Poems, selected and introduced by Sasha Soldatow and published by Angus & Robertson in 1990. I didn't open the book until I knew I could take it to bed and read it entirely. My gut told me Harry and Sasha would eat me, my night, my bed, effortlessly. And they did!

Unanimism and the crowd

Early modern social lyric

Joseph Pennell, drawing of Cambria steel works, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1917. Image from the Library of Congress.

Published in 1905, when Jules Romains was twenty years old, “Poetry and Unanimous Feelings”[1] launches one of his dominant themes: “unanimous,” or, as will be seen, “unanimistic” feelings. He will expand on the theme (theme-assemblage, really) over a lifetime, in poems, novels, plays, essays. To name, today, his articulation of the social and the aesthetic is a bit like trying to name a constellation’s mythological shape. The terms composing the constellation come from various discourses and have distinctly differentiated meanings and references: the crowd, sociality, the social, class, lumpen, group, mass, multitude, people, folk, gathering, audience, community, public, commune.…

The difference between 'late modernism' and 'post-modernism'

Ask an expert. Hmm. If you want to find a cogent explanation of the difference between late modernism and postmodernism, don't by any means go to TutorDaily.info. The site announces that it's "a place to ask questions about Learning and Teaching." Someone, presumably a student somewhere grappling with a paper assignment, posted this question: "What are the differences between Late Modernism and Post-Modernism?" And here is the response: "To put it simple, late modernism is the easiest form of modernism and post-modernism is a more fine sort of painting."

Radical artifice and other topics, 1991

Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff

We at PennSound have just segmented an interview with Marjorie Perloff conducted by Aldon Nielsen for the Incognito Lounge in Palo Alto, CA, November 12, 1991. Here are the clips:

[] introduction by A.L. Nielsen (0:51): MP3

[] work on Frank O'Hara (7:13): MP3

[] "The Futurist Moment, poetic movements, and marginalized works (7:47): MP3

[] "The Poetics of Indeterminacy" and John Cage (15:02): MP3

[] the avant-garde and post-modernism (7:57): MP3

[] L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (7:42): MP3

And the complete interview (1:06:36): MP3. Here is the link to PennSound's Perloff page.

Modernism & Domestic Help

Bob Perelman and Kristen Gallagher Discuss

Bob Perelman and Kristen Gallagher on domestic help and modernism (audio): mp3 (3:34).

Modernist Pedagogy at the End of the Lecture

IT and the Poetry Classroom

This essay on modernist poetry at the end of the lecture is now available through the Selected Works site. Many thanks to Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh for commissioning it and for fabulous editorial and other advice along the way. Thanks also to Julia Bloch, whose class session on the sounds of Amiri Baraka was inspirational.

Poetry Moves from the 1920s to the 1930s

An Audio Mini-lecture on the Transition from High Modernism to Radicalism

About a decade ago I recorded a mini-lecture about the transition from the American poetry of the 1920s to that of the 1930s. It gives some obvious dramatic examples of big changes, e.g. Isidor Schneider's move from latter-day imagist in the mid-1920s to communist poet of the 1930s. I left out any nuance here, but then the nuance became the subject of my most recent book, which in a sense refutes the standard description of the big change ("from modernism to radicalism"). However, I do stand by this little audio mini-lecture as a first foray into the topic for my students. And naturally, in the course, we read lots of examples.

Handbook of Modern & Contemporary American Poetry

I have an essay in this forthcoming book, and am excited to keep such good company. I expect the book won't be out for another year. And I'm probably jumping the gun in posting the contents but I'll wait 'til someone tells me to take it down. You'll get the gist of what's in it, anyway. (Below at right: Cary Nelson.)

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

Edited by Cary Nelson

1. A Century of Innovation: American Poetry from 1900 to the Present
  Cary Nelson

2. Social Texts and Poetic Texts: Poetry and Cultural Studies
          Rachel Blau DuPlessis

3. American Indian Poetry at the Dawn of Modernism
          Robert Dale Parker

4. “Jeweled Bindings”: Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality
          Melissa Girard

Cary Nelson5. Hired Men and Hired Women: Modern American Poetry and the Labor Problem
          John Marsh

6. Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore
          Linda A. Kinnahan

7. Poetry and Rhetoric: Modernism and Beyond
          Peter Nicholls

8. Cézanne’s Ideal of “Realization”: A Useful Analogy for the Spirit of Modernity in American Poetry
 Charles Altieri

9. Stepping Out, Sitting In: Modern Poetry’s Counterpoint with Jazz and the Blues
          Edward Brunner

10.  Out With the Crowd: Modern American Poets Speaking to Mass Culture
            Tim Newcomb

11.  Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry
           Scene, 1920-1960
            Susan Rosenbaum

12.  Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America
          Mike Chasar

13.  “With Ambush and Stratagem”: American Poetry in the Age of Pure War
            Philip Metres

14.  The Fight and the Fiddle in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry
           Karen Jackson Ford

15.  Asian American Poetry
           Josephine Park

16.  “The Pardon of Speech”: The Psychoanalysis of Modern American Poetry
            Walter Kalaidjian

17.  American Poetry, Prayer, and the News
           Jahan Ramazani

18.  The Tranquilized Fifties: Forms of Dissent in Postwar American Poetry
           Michael Thurston

19.  The End of the End of Poetic Ideology, 1960
           Al Filreis

20.  Fieldwork in New American Poetry: From Cosmology to Discourse
           Lytle Shaw

21.  “Do our chains offend you?”: The Poetry of American Political Prisoners
            Mark W. Van Wienen

22.  Disability Poetics
           Michael Davidson

23.  Green Reading: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Environmental Criticism
           Lynn Keller

24.  Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry
           Timothy Yu

25.  “Internationally Known”: The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop
            James Smethurst

26.  Minding Machines / Machining Minds: Writing (at) the Human-Machine Interface
           Adalaide Morris

facing left


A few years ago John Serio was asked to edit the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens and expressed the hope that I'd summarize what I'd learned over the years about Stevens' response to the radical-left poetics of the 1930s, so I wrote a short paper (10 pages in print) and it appeared in that very good volume. Today I uploaded a PDF copy to my "Selected Works" site: here's the essay.

H.D.'s desk

Lately I've been reading the blog of the Beinecke Library, called "Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities." I took special note of a recent gift made to the Beinecke: H.D.'s writing desk. Its provenance seems significant, but no one knows for sure. H.D. biographer Barbara Guest: "Said to be Christina Rosetti’s, it may originally have belonged to Empress Eugenie, who spent several years in exile in England. Bryher bought the desk for H. D. at the estate sale of Violet Hunt” (Herself Defined, 56). In the photo of the desk, in its new place in New Haven, we see a portrait H.D.'s friend and literary executor (and longtime Yale English faculty member) Norman Holmes Pearson.

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