Sleeping with the Lesson Plan
Ellie & Meredith
Announcements (5 mins)
*Ellipses Activity*
Run the Program (5 mins)
- Run program twice, ask people to read poems aloud. Can we get meaning from these poems, even if they were randomly generated? Do these make more or less sense than Mullen’s original?
Debrief/discuss (5 mins)
- How did you feel doing this activity (the filling-in blanks part)? Did you like it? Did it change the way you read this poem?
- How did this activity change the way you read the poem? Did it at all?
- Concepts: The idea of randomness in Mullen’s poetry / language poetry in general.
- What’s said/ unsaid in Mullen’s poetry
- This poem relies on leaving open the unsaid. What does it mean for us to call up responses to these ellipses? Are we going against the spirit in which the poem was written, or with it?
*Transition to theory*
Possible direction: Us vs. Them in “Elliptical”
-
- Lead this into a quick lecture on Language & Black Arts poetry.
Possible direction: Breakdown of language (oulipo)
*Brief Lecture* (5 mins):
Harryette Mullen is generally categorized at the center of two literary camps.
- Language poetry: Came up in the 70’s (after New York school).
In response to the New York School: poets turning on language itself
Stripping the poem of the lyric “I” in order to divorce language from meaning
Emphasizes the role of reader and creates a form of communal reading
Political affiliation: left; contests the established social order by challenging established associations within language
Language poetry is participatory: it relies on reader’s act of near-translation to become an active literary experience.
Precusor: Gertrude Stein
Has continued to influence poetry today, esp. since the most influential writers are still teaching today
Key writers: Lyn Heijinian, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein.
- Black Arts Movement:
“the artistic sister of the Black Power Movement”
Seminal work: Amiri Baraka, “Black Art.” “Poems are bullshit unless they are / teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step.”
Shares a strong rejection of societal convention; here, however, the focus is specifically on racial injustice
Dates: 1960-1970. Coincided with the civil rights and Black Power movements.
Parallel to Harlem Renaissance: drawing on AAVE, musical influences to provide the poems with rhythm.
Key writers: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, Lorraine Hansberry.
Critical conversation about Mullen:
Critics are using Mullen to push back at limits of Language poetry. Her work exemplifies the way that language cannot be divorced from identity — words are always connected, through a reader’s set of associations, to their cultural context.
Look to Any Lit as an example of these two forces.
*Close reading!* (15 mins)
Big three poems to touch on:
- Coo/ Slur
- Making the issue of color literal; taking clichés to the very roots and building up.
- Words mean doubly to the point of not being readable. Ask a brave soul to read the poem aloud; talk about that person’s choice in pronunciation.
- Title is an anagram for the word “colours” (British spelling). (from an interview with Mullen).
- The idea of our society having default colors (think “flesh-toned” crayons) — Mullen is making readers feel uncomfortable in the context of color.
- In an interview, Mullen said about this poem “I’m not saying that this poem is profound or deep at all. It’s free association from a list of colors.”
- Souvenir from Anywhere
- Shares a focus on color with “Coo/Slur.” What does it do differently? How does this function as Mullen’s rejection of colorblindness?
- Black Nikes
(In case the essays don’t come up during the close reading: 5 mins).
- Poetry and identity: Are Mullen’s aesthetics more closely aligned with the Language Poets or the Black Arts movement? Is it important to categorize her at all? What is the name of the anthology you would put her in?
*Activity* (10 mins): Create a class poem! Split into two, one group creates a scaffolding for the sentence and writes it on the poster board. while the other prepares a list of nouns/ phrases to fill in. Get together and put the poems together on poster board. Then
Final question (5 mins): Responding to Erin’s challenge — where can the avant-garde go from NY School? Where did it go? How does Mullen’s poetry provide an answer to this question — if it does at all?
