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Cronin's essay was an interesting one because it dealt with poetry in a similar way as the Rich article did, since Cronin is basically saying that oral poetry in South Africa is politically charged. This was a particularly interesting essay to read because it comes from a time when Cronin and other South African blacks were still suffering under the oppression of apartheid, which makes it emerge from different kinds of issues than some of the other essays in the Poetry in Theory book.

I have to say after reading the other two readings for today I really appreciated readings the Enzensberger piece. I felt that in many ways it was similar to the Bernstein piece that Matt talked about in class a couple of weeks ago. I also liked how Enzenberger is playing with canonical texts like Swift's "Modest Proposal."

In thinking about the Hughes essay, I was struck by how he envisions the black artist to be a Romantic artist. I say this because Hughes keeps going back to the idea in the essay that the black artist needs to find "himself". This reeks of Romanticism to me because it seems to imply that there is some essential self that one should be tapping in order to produce really great art. What this seems to be insinuating is that it is the individual poet that matters the most, as opposed to the culture that the poet comes from.

In general, I really liked the introduction to the "Black Riders" book. As I feel that too often we forget that there is a material base on which all poetry, for that matter all writing, exists on. It is important to think critically about a poem's materiality because the way in which a poem appears in print determines how we read it.

In particular, I liked how the intro. further made the point that materiality is important through a discussion of Dickinson's poems. I feel that using Dickinson was a good choice because of how her work was published up through the 1950s. I also liked how in the discussion of Dickinson, McGann made the point that earlier publications of Dickinson's work are not necessarily "bad" because they were products of their time. I thought that this was interesting comment because, perhaps, there may come a day when the way Dickinson, along with other authors, is published now might be felt to be dated, as what is deemed important by readers and critics changes.

One final thing, I believe Matt said in class last week that he read the Bernstein article at a slower pace than normal because it is written as poetry. I have to say that I had the opposite happen to me, as I found myself reading pages very quickly and just trying to take in as much as I could but without losing the pace that I had established.

Olson says, "It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he had done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work" (293). Yeah, he is right. The typewriter allows a poet the ability to control the way his work appears in print and in doing so the poet can provide his reader with a glimpse of how a poem could be performed. I also find it interesting and I agree with the various ways that Olson thinks about poetry in relation to music. As poetry needs to be spoken and by connecting it to music is one of the ways to encourage the habit of performing poetry.

Speaking of music Baraka also makes connections between music and poetry when he talks about playing like Charlie Parker and understanding the way the Chralie Parker plays music. He seems to be getting at some of Olson's ideas, in particular the idea that what we need to be thinking about is the process of making poetry, rather than what we see on the printed page in front of us. I think this is one way to connect Olson's idea of poetry as kinetic energy to Baraka's emphazising of the making over the made.

The only thing that I found disappointing about Baraka's piece was the way that he flat out slams imitator's. Baraka says, "The imitator is the most pitiful phenomenon since he is like a man who eats garbage" (387). As some imitation can be a good thing, as long as it is aimed in the direction of doing something different with what is being imitated. Although, Baraka might not slam imitator's that are producing something new by copying someone else, as he might slam someone that is just trying to do the same thing as the person they are imitating.

I propose to do a reading of the oral poem Drum Poem 7 from Technicians of the Sacred. What I want to do is talk about how the poem makes one take into consideration issues of sound and performance, as to read the beginning of the poem is to try and replicate the sound of a drum. Of course, I realize that issues of sound and performance must be taken into consideration when discussing any poem, whether it be from an oral or literate culture. I also want to think about how Eliot's essay Tradition and the Individual Talent and Reflections on Contemporary Poetry can be complicated when taking the drum poem into considersation because an American poet, Rothenberg, felt it necessary to not only bring attention to oral poetry but to incorporate elements of it into American poetry itself. I also plan on incorporating some ideas from Foley's How to Read an Oral Poem.

I liked Jarrell's article because of his idea that modernist poetry was connected to romantic poetry. Jarrell suggests that Modernist poetry evolved out of Romantic poetry and he supports this claim by listing various ways that the two can be shown to be connected, which include: originality, disorganization, emotions, emphasis on details, the unconscious, etc. All of which I can agree with when I think of say a Wordsworth poem and say an Eliot poem.

Jarrell seems to suggest that the reason why people have believed that the two poetic traditions are seperate is due to a tendency of critics to focus on how a Romantic poem is different from a Modern poem. It is due to this attention to difference that critics and poets were able to conceal what the two periods of poetry shared.

Keeping all of the above in mind, what is Jarrell's point? Is it to simply show that Modernism emerged out of a prior poetic tradition? Is it to suggest that Modernist poems have been read wrong or that Romantic poems have been read wrong? Is it to point out that it is a mistake to not read Keats next to Williams? I guess what I am trying to get at here is that I buy most of what Jarrell suggests but I am left with some questions about what am I supposed to do with the idea that Modernism evolved out of Romanticism.

I have to say that I liked a lot of the things that Forrest-Thomson says in her essay. One thing that I particularly liked was her insistence that readers, and I think poets as well, must remember that poems operate through many devices, like rhythm and sound, in order to create meaning. This is important to keep in mind because I think often people tend to disregard how a poem is structured and how it produces meaning, instead I feel that some people prefer to operate just on the very surface of poems, that is to say they only read the words, most likely silently.

Another thing that I liked about this essay was the idea that in order for a poem to really be a poem it must force a reader to look to or think about the external world outside of the poem and then take into consideration how those external facts contribute to the reading of a poem in order to get back to the poem and its potential meanings. Thus, poetry must be of the world of ordinary language and distinct from the world of ordinary language.

Finally, I liked how she discussed the idea that prose and poetry are essentially different to be a product of convention. I understood this to mean that it is society that dictates what is to be bland, nothing but the facts writing and what kind of writing is to be considered to be charged with meaning. In connection with this I liked her free play with the Times article.

One of the things about Easthope's book that I have liked so far has been his reminder to his readers that poetry of any kind is created from an historical moment. In saying that he is also making the case that poetry is material, and is ideological. I find these observations/reminders to be a really good thing because I think that sometimes in English Departments there is a tendencey to not treat poetry in the same vein as the novel. What I mean by this is that I think for some English professors poetry is still mysterious and therefore one cannot interrogate it like one can interrogate a novel. Easthope's book of course tries to correct this by suggesting that there is nothing natural about poetry it is a constructed thing.

I also appreciate Easthope's book because it does a great job of bringing various theoretical schools into play from the Russian Formalists to Derrida and everything in between. I like this for the same reason that I mentioned above that in bringing all of those schools into play, Easthope is making a case that we must not think of poetry as something that is natural and that exists outside of history.

The final thing that I want to discuss is his discussion about how even free verse when viewed critically exhibits a use of iambic pentameter. I guess this surprised me somewhat because I have not be viewing free verse as critically as I should be, as I generally have just accepted that it was indeed a major break in form from "traditional" Anglo-American poetry.

To begin with at first I liked Lowell's article less and less with each sentence of it that I read. However, upon thinking about it a little bit after reading it, I am less repulsed by it because I think she sometimes makes extreme comments because she sees poetry as she understands it on the verge of utter destruction. An example of something that I take to be extreme is: "Poetry will come into its Paradise when carefully trained speakers make a business of interpretating it to the world. And poetry needs such interpretation, for I suppose it is only one reader out of a hundred who can possibly get all the beauty out of a poem" (71). I was repulsed by this quote because it seems to turn poetry into something that is not open to everybody.

The above begin said I found other things that she had to say to be interesting. One example is that poetry has a "simple, straightforward appeal" This surprised me because if the essence of poetry always constitutes simplicity and straighforwardness then it would seem that the masses do not need a critic to tell them what a poem means. But maybe Lowell would counter me by saying that it is due to readers being taught improperly how to read a poem that has caused the need for critics to reveal the meaning of poems.

One thing for certain that I would agree with Lowell on is her idea that poetry and music share an "essential kinship" and that one of the ways to recognize this kinship is to open up poetry to orality again. That being said it seems to me that she has a very particular understanding of oral poetry that seems to rely on a few individuals enlightening the masses on the correct way to perform a poem, which in the end causes me to say that Lowell's article is interesting but troublesome.

I have to say that overall I am finding these New Criticism readings to be interesting. I still largely disagree with everything that they are saying but I think that to some degree one needs to read them in order to have some understanding of the history of literary criticism in the U.S.

One thing that I found interesting in the Leavis article was the idea that the majority of people in Leavis' day were incapable of understanding poetry. He suggests that this is due to the fact that the poetry of his day has "no roots" and that there is no live tradition of poetry.

Another thing that I found interesting in the essay was the idea that the poet is more attuned to the world than anyone else. As Leavis says, "poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by other means" (195). I found this to be interesting because it reminds me of some of Emerson's ideas about the poet. For example, Emerson writes in an essay of his that it is not that a blacksmith is incapable of seeing the sun, rather he looks at it and only sees a ball of heat in the sky, whereas the poet sees that ball of heat and its signficance in Nature.

The final interesting thing that I want to mention is Leavis idea of what a great modern poet needs to do. Leavis says, "All that we can fairly ask of the poet is that he shall show himself to have been fully alive in our time. The evidence will be in the very texture of his poetry" (197). I find this interesting because it connects somewhat with what Eliot was saying about poets in the essay we read for last week. As Eliot also placed emphasis on a poet being a man of his time, along with letting the history of the poetic tradition speak through him, no wonder Leavis' favorite poet is Eliot.

When I first sat down to begin reading Brooks' book I thought that I was going to dread it. I thought this way because I have often been taught about New Criticism without having read a considerable amount of the criticism. That being said I was not surprised by what I found in the text. Brooks laid out a number of key ideas but there are two in particular that I want to draw attention to. The first key idea that I will discuss is Brooks' adherence to the idea of unity. The second key idea that I found throughout the text was that all great poems present readers with paradoxes.

Brooks' says of Wordsworth's "Ode" "The continunity between child and man is actually unbroken." Brooks' further invokes the idea of unity concerning the "Ode" when he connects Wordsworth with Yeats, "a comparison with several of Yeats's poems which deal with still another related theme: unity of being and the unifying power of the imagination" (148-9). Brooks' makes similar claims when discussing Keats' work, "If we can see that the assertions made in a poem are to be taken as part of an organic context, if we can resist the temptation to deal with them in isolation, then we may be willing to go on to deal with world-view, or 'philosophy,' or 'truth' of the poem as a whole in terms of its dramatic wholeness" (165-6). Unity or wholeness is a fundamental part of a great poem for Brooks because by looking at the poem as a whole and purely as a work of art as it appears completed on a printed page, one can more easily make assertions that poems mean certain things and not others.

Brooks' idea that poems can only have particular meanings leads me to my next key issue that being the idea that a great poem is paradoxical. For Brook's great poets write great poems because they embrace paradox in their poetry, which allows them to grant their poems an almost magical quality. What this idea allows Brooks' to do is to maintain a certain canon of poets because if a poet does not employ paradox, he can never be among the company of Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, etc.

So, in the end I found alot of things that I was told I would find when I read a piece of New Criticism. That being said I have to say I rather enjoyed reading the book, which greatly surprised me.

I like Rhyme's Reason because I feel that Hollander is playing with poetry. What I mean by this is that rather than just provide one with a history of poetic terms and their uses, he makes a deliberate attempt to thurst those terms into textual space by making poems that illustrate the structure that is created when one creates for example a free verse poem but he also uses the description of those terms as the content for his poems. For me this makes his book a book of poems about the construction of poems. I also appreciated the fact that he does not assume a certain level of reader knowledge because I already knew about free verse and pattern poems but as far as I can recall I have never heard of a sestina (which I have to say I think provides an interesting way to play with repetition).

What I appreciated about Cook's intro. to Poetry in Theory was his ability to illustrate to the reader the history of conflict that exists when one attempts to define twentieth-century poetics. Like with Rhyme's Reason, there were some things that I knew such as Heidegger, and T.S. Eliot's thoughts concerning poetics but there were also things that I learned about such as the differences between Rilke and Zukofsky's ideas concerning a "thing-poem." So, again I appreciated Cook's willingness to not assume that I already knew certain things just because I was reading a book on poetic theory.

To connect to the end of today's class discussion, I find it interesting that a number of us decided to employ the cut-up method in order to aid us in creating our respective final projects. I find this interesting for three reasons: 1) As far as I can remember we did not discuss the cut-up method in detail in class 2) that we are using the method with different mediums (Stephanie using poems and the Wiki space; Lindsay using a favorite movie; Jason and I using research papers and mashing) 3) we all have different reasons for employing the method. Lindsay seemed to want to use the method in order to be spontanteous while constructing her piece and Jason and I wanted to employ the method in order to add a level of chance to our piece.

I have been thinking throughout the day about Containment art. One of the things I have been thinking about is how when I enter into a museum I have certain expectations (expectations that I feel Containment art challenges by being strange when thinking of Containment art with the art we are used to seeing in museums). One expectation that I have is that regardless of what medium the art pieces are employing that it will be a rather individual and contemplative experience for me, i.e. that the museum will be rather quiet and people will let me look at a piece for however long I want to, etc. I have been thinking about this because I have not had similar expectations for literary pieces for several years now, so I have been asking myself why am I making exceptions for one form of art and not for another? I am still thinking about this issue but what I have come up with so far is that I still understand fine art (paintings, sculptures, etc.) as existing within a carefully framed institution (the museum), which of course is one of the things that containment art challenges.

I have been thinking quite a bit about the idea of interactivity and new media art, which got another shot in the arm today from the end of today's discussion. I started thinking seriously about interactivity when we viewed Vniverse as a class and continued to think of it as I looked for a piece to present as an MSA (which is a hypertext poem). Thinking about interactivity over the past couple of weeks, I have come to the conclusion that for the most part concerning what we have looked at in the class that interactivity in new media art provides a user/viewer with a circle. Sometimes, the circle is rather small, like with hypertext poems, sometimes the circle is large like with Vniverse.

I decided to present Kendall's "Dispossession" to the class because as the class has been proceeding, I have found myself drawn more and more to issues of space. As the idea of the Web suggests that there is almost an unlimited amount of space available, however, as we have discussed in class most webpages that we are dealing with have to stay within certain constraints, such as bandwidth limits. So when I was looking for something to share with the class I wanted to bring issues of space into play. As I was surfing around the EPC Poet list, I found Kendall's piece. I chose Kendall's piece because it seemed to share some similarities with the Vniverse piece, such as how to present an interactive poem. There are also some differences that will be discussed (one that immediately comes to mind is that Kendall's piece was created in 1999). If people are willing I would like to go around the class and have people read a part of "Dispossession" as it appears on the screen. Just to get an idea of how the poem sounds.

As I was reading Manovich's introduction to NMR I felt that the following two quotes were troublesome: "those computer scientists who invented these technologies--J.C. R. Licklider, [etc.] ... are the important artists of our time, maybe the only artists who are truly important and who will be remembered from this historical period" (15)and later "The articles by Licklider, Sutherland, [etc.] ... included in the reader are the essential documents of our time; one day the historians of culture will rate them on the same scale of importance as texts by Marx, Freud, Saussure" (24). When I read those lines earlier today I found them troublesome.