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from Martinez, Aja Y. Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. Conference on College Composition and Communication ; National Council of Teachers of English, 2020.

“Delgado characterizes counterstory as ‘a kind of counter-reality; created by/experienced by ‘outgroups’ subordinate to those atop the racial and gendered hierarchy (“Storytelling” 2412-13). While those in power, or as Delgado offers, the ‘ingroup,’ craft stock stories to establish a shared sense of identity and reality and to naturalize their superior position, the ‘outgroup aims to subvert that ingroup reality’ (“Storytelling” 2312-13). Delgado describes stock stores as the stories those in positions of dominance collectively form and tell about themselves. These stories choose and pick among available facts and present a picture of the world that best befits and supports their positions of relative power (“Storytelling” 2421). Stock stories feign neutrality and at all costs avoid any blame or responsibility for societal inequality.

Stock stores are powerful because they are often repeated until canonized or normalized, and those who tell them insist that their version of events is indeed reality, and that any stories that counter these standardized tellings are biased and therefor note credible (see also Chapter 1, “Who’s Afraid of CRT (and Counterstory)?”_/ Delgado suggests that counterstory as a methodology intervenes in stock stories told by the ‘ingroup’ that dismiss or decenter racism and those whose lives are daily affected by it. Counterstory then is a method of telling stories by people whose experiences are not often told. Counterstory as methodology serves to expose, analyze, and challenge stock stories of racial privilege and can help to strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance” (33-34).

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One way of organizing poets and poetry is through the idea of "movements" or "schools" similar to how art is often categorized. How the schools came to be is probably an entire course. Some might argue that these schools arise organically out of community as in the case of the creators of this web exhibit.

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Poetry groups and movements or schools may be self-identified by the poets that form them or defined by critics who see unifying characteristics of a body of work by more than one poet. To be a 'school' a group of poets must share a common style or a common ethos. A commonality of form is not in itself sufficient to define a school; for example, Edward Lear, George du Maurier and Ogden Nash do not form a school simply because they all wrote limericks.

There are many different 'schools' of poetry. Some of them are described below in approximate chronological sequence. The subheadings indicate broadly the century in which a style arose.

Prehistoric

The oral tradition is too broad to be a strict school but it is a useful grouping of works whose origins either predate writing, or belong to cultures without writing.

The Makars were a diverse genere of Scottish poets who wrote during the Northern Renaissance.

The Castalian Band

The Areopagus (poetry)

The Metaphysical poets

The Cavalier poets

The Danrin school

Classical poetry echoes the forms and values of classical antiquity. Favouring formal, restrained forms, it has recurred in various Neoclassical schools since the eighteenth century Augustan poets such as Alexander Pope.

The Parnassians were a group of late 19th-century French poets, named after their journal, the Parnasse contemporain. They included Charles Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Sully-Prudhomme, Paul Verlaine, François Coppée, and José María de Heredia. In reaction to the looser forms of romantic poetry, they strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and classical subjects, which they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment.

Romanticism started in late 18th century Western Europe, but existed largely within the nineteenth. Wordsworth's and Coleridge's 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads is considered by some as the first important publication in the movement. Romanticism stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom within or even from classical notions of form in art, and the rejection of established social conventions. It stressed the importance of "nature" in language and celebrated the achievements of those perceived as heroic individuals and artists. Romantic poets include William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats (those previous six sometimes referred to as the Big Six, or the Big Five without Blake); other Romantic poets include James Macpherson, Robert Southey, and Emily Brontë.

Modernist poetry is a broad term for poetry written between 1890 and 1970 in the tradition of Modernism. Schools within it include Imagism and the British Poetry Revival.

The Fireside Poets (also known as the Schoolroom or Household Poets) were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England. The group is usually described as comprising Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The were (predominantly young) poets working in England and America in the early 20th century, including F. S. Flint, T. E. Hulme, Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle (known primarily by her initials, H.D.). They rejected Romantic and Victorian conventions, favoring precise imagery and clear, non-elevated language. Ezra Pound formulated and promoted many precepts and ideas of Imagism. His "In a Station of the Metro" (Roberts & Jacobs, 717), written in 1916, is often used as an example of Imagist poetry:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The Objectivists were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists from the 1940s. They include Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Basil Bunting. Objectivists treated the poem as an object; they emphasised sincerity, intelligence, and the clarity of the poet's vision.

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement in the 1920s involving many African-American writers from the New York Neighbourhood of Harlem.

The Beat generation poets met in New York in the 1940s. The core group were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, who were joined later by Gregory Corso.

The New York School was an informal group of poets active in 1950s New York City whose work was said to be a reaction to the Confessionalists. Some major figures include John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan and Bill Berkson.

The Black Mountain poets (also known as the Projectivists) were a group of mid 20th century postmodern poets associated with Black Mountain College in the United States.

The Movement was a group of English writers including Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Alfred Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings and Robert Conquest. Their tone is anti-romantic and rational. The connection between the poets was described as "little more than a negative determination to avoid bad principles."

The British Poetry Revival was a loose movement during the 1970s and 1980s. It was a Modernist reaction to the conservative Movement.

The Hungry generation was a group of about 40 poets in West Bengal, India during 1961-1965 who revolted against the colonial canons in Bengali poetry and wanted to go back to their roots. The movement was spearheaded by Shakti Chattopadhyay, Malay Roy Choudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, and Subimal Basak.

The Martian poets were English poets of the 1970s and early 1980s, including Craig Raine and Christopher Reid. Through the heavy use of curious, exotic, and humorous metaphors, Martian poetry aimed to break the grip of "the familiar" in English poetry, by describing ordinary things as if through the eyes of a Martian.

The Language poets were avant garde poets who emerged in the 1960s-1990s; their approach started with the modernist emphasis on method. They were reacting to the poetry of the Black Mountain and Beat poets. The poets included: Leslie Scalapino, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, and Tina Darragh.

The Misty Poets are a group of Chinese poets whose style is defined by the obscurity of its imagery and metaphors. The movement was born after the Cultural Revolution. Leading members include Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Duo Duo, and Yang Lian.

The Nuyorican poets of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s wrote and recited dramatic poetry in Spanish, Spanglish, and English with humor and rage about social injustice, ethnic and racial discrimination, and U.S. colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Leaders of the Nuyorican poetry movement include Pedro Pietri, Miguel Algarín, and Giannina Braschi. The Nuyorican movement gave rise to Poetry slams, a performing arts practice developed at open mic venues such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Loisada of New York City.

The New Formalism is a late-twentieth and early twenty-first century movement in American poetry that promotes a return to metrical and rhymed verse. Rather than looking to the Confessionalists, they look to Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, and Donald Justice for poetic influence. These poets are associated with the West Chester University Poetry Conference, and with literary journals like The New Criterion and The Hudson Review. Associated poets include Dana Gioia, Timothy Steele, Mark Jarman, Rachel Hadas, R. S. Gwynn, Charles Martin, Phillis Levin, Kay Ryan, Brad Leithauser.

The Proletarian poetry is a genre of political poetry developed in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s that endeavored to portray class-conscious perspectives of the working-class. Connected through their mutual political message that may be either explicitly Marxist or at least socialist, the poems are often aesthetically disparate.

Alphabetic list

This is a list of poetry groups and movements.

References

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List of poetry groups and movements - Wikipedia

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Poetry groups and movements or schools may be self-identified by the poets that form them or defined by critics who see unifying characteristics of a body of work by more than one poet. To be a 'school' a group of poets must share a common style or a common ethos.

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This page will let you search by school/movement to find bios, poems, articles, etc, as well.

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Search more than 2,500 biographies of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and William Wordsworth, and contemporary poets, including U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and other award-winning poets. You can even find poets by state and schools & movements.

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Find bios, articles, poems, etc., from a longstanding poetry establishment.

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Current Issue

Read Issue

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A source for finding primary sources

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Research military records at the National Archives from the Revolutionary War to the present.

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This PBS series has episodes on several American poets

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American Masters is an award-winning signature PBS series created by The WNET Group and is made possible by all of you.

Major Support for American Masters provided by

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Archive of all American Masters by name and topic.

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Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC)

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Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC)

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Biographical and historical information

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SNAC is an aggregate of biographical information about people, both individuals and groups, who created or are documented in historical resources. Users can search for names of individual people, organizations, and families, browse featured descriptions, and discover and locate connected historical resources.

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This is a video series from the 60s about poets of the times

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USA: Poetry - YouTube

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A selection of films from the 1965/1966 NET/KQED series, Poetry: USA and Outtakes produced from these initial films in the late 1970s.

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Some articles on poets and poetry.

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Home

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MCQs

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Poetry

Glossary of Poetic Terms

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on September 20, 2020 • ( 0 )

Accentual meter: A base meter in which the occurrence of a syllable marked by a stress determines the basic unit, regardless of the number of unstressed syllables. It is one of four base meters used in English (accentual, accentual-syllabic, syllabic,… Read More ›

Analysis of Henry Vaughan’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 23, 2020 • ( 0 )

Henry Vaughan’s first collection, Poems, is very derivative; in it can be found borrowings from Donne, Jonson, William Hobington, William Cartwright, and others. It contains only thirteen poems in addition to the translation of Juvenal. Seven poems are written to… Read More ›

Analysis of Edmund Spenser’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 23, 2020 • ( 0 )

By an eclectic mingling of old traditions, Edmund Spenser created new poetry—new in verse forms, in language, and in genre. From the Middle Ages, Spenser had inherited complex allegorical traditions and a habit of interlacing narrative strands; these traditions were… Read More ›

Analysis of Robert Southwell’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 22, 2020 • ( 0 )

Robert Southwell (1561 – 1595) wrote religious poetry with a didactic purpose. In the prose preface to a manuscript, addressed to his cousin, he says that poets who write of the “follies and fayninges” of love have discredited poetry to… Read More ›

Analysis of Philip Sidney’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 22, 2020 • ( 0 )

Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586) was educated to embrace an unusual degree of political, religious,and cultural responsibility, yet it is clear from his comments in Defence of Poesie that he took his literary role as seriously. Both this critical… Read More ›

Analysis of Walter Raleigh’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 21, 2020 • ( 0 )

If readers take him at his face value (or at the value of one of his many faces), Sir Walter Raleigh (1554? – 1618) epitomized, accepted, and chose to live out the daring expansiveness and buoyancy of the Elizabethan court…. Read More ›

Analysis of Thomas Nashe’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 21, 2020 • ( 0 )

Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) the satirical pamphleteer, who was wont to use language as a cudgel in a broad prose style, seldom disciplined himself to the more delicate work of writing poetry. Both his temperament and his pocketbook directed him to… Read More ›

Analysis of Andrew Marvell’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 21, 2020 • ( 0 )

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) is firmly established today in the ranks of the Metaphysical poets, and there is no question that much of his work clearly displays the qualities appropriate to such a position. He reveals a kinship with the Metaphysical… Read More ›

Analysis of Christopher Marlowe’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 21, 2020 • ( 0 )

Christopher Marlowe’s (1564-1593) lyric poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is known in several versions of varying length. C. F. Tucker Brooke’s 1962 reprint of his 1910edition of Marlowe’s works cites the six-stanza version of England’s Helicon, with variant… Read More ›

Analysis of Ben Jonson’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 20, 2020 • ( 0 )

Until the last few decades, attention to Ben Jonson’s (1572-1637) poetry focused largely on the famous songs and the moving epitaphs on children. Such choices were not ill-advised, but they are unrepresentative. The works in these modes certainly rank among… Read More ›

Analysis of Thomas Dekker’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 20, 2020 • ( 0 )

Most of Thomas Dekker’s (1572 – 1632) best poetry is found in his plays; unfortunately, since most of his plays were collaborations, it is often difficult to assign particular poetic pas-sages to Dekker, and perhaps even harder to assign the… Read More ›

Analysis of Richard Crashaw’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 19, 2020 • ( 0 )

Richard Crashaw’s (1613 – 1649) poetry may be divided into three groups of unequal significance for the scholar: the early epigrams, the secular poetry, and the religious poetry. The early epigrams and translations are studied, meticulous, and often occasional. The… Read More ›

Analysis of Abraham Cowley’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 19, 2020 • ( 0 )

Abraham Cowley (1618—1667) is a transitional figure, a poet who tended to relinquish the emotional values of John Donne and George Herbert and grasp the edges of reason and wit.He was more versatile than the early Metaphysicals: He embraced the… Read More ›

Analysis of Thomas Carew’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 18, 2020 • ( 0 )

A man with many masters—Donne, Jonson, Giambattista Marino—Thomas Carew (1595 –1640) was slave to none, although as a Cavalier poet he has been generally regarded as one of Jonson’s followers. Like Jonson, Carew commanded many lyric forms, and his lines… Read More ›

Analysis of Thomas Campion’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 18, 2020 • ( 0 )

In one sense, Thomas Campion (12 February 1567 – 1 March 1620) was typically Elizabethan: Classical mythology, amorous encounters with either distant courtly ladies or willing country maids, and superficial religious emotions provided his subjects and themes. Although much of… Read More ›

English Poetry in the Seventeenth Century

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 18, 2020 • ( 1 )

A question that can be asked of any century’s poetry is whether it owes its character to “forces”—nonliterary developments to which the poets respond more or less sensitively—or whether, on the other hand, the practice of innovative and influential poets… Read More ›

English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 17, 2020 • ( 0 )

The poetry of the sixteenth century defies facile generalizations. Although the same can obviously be said for the poetry of other periods as well, this elusiveness of categorization is particularly characteristic of the sixteenth century. It is difficult to pinpoint… Read More ›

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 17, 2020 • ( 0 )

One of William Shakespeare’s (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) great advantages as a writer was that, as a dramatist working in the public theater, he was afforded a degree of autonomy from the cultural dominance of the… Read More ›

Analysis of Philip Whalen’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 16, 2020 • ( 0 )

Although often considered experimental and sometimes obscure, the poetry of Philip Whalen (20 October 1923 – 26 June 2002) is marked by a directness of expression that matches his concern with directness of experience. The seemingly oblique or broken sentences… Read More ›

Analysis of Diane Wakoski’s Poems

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 16, 2020 • ( 0 )

Since Diane Wakoski (born August 3, 1937) believes that “the poems in her published books give all the important information about her life,” her life and her art are inextricably related. She states that the poem “must organically come out… Read More ›

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Posts about Poetry written by NASRULLAH MAMBROL

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Maria Popova's "blog" about literature, culture, philosophy, etc.

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Literary Ladies Guide | Inspiration for Readers and Writers from Classic Women Authors

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Inspiration for Readers and Writers from Classic Women Authors

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Voices from the Gaps [377]

Persistent link to this collection: https://hdl.handle.net/11299/164018

About Voices from the Gaps

University of Minnesota professors Toni McNaron (English) and Carol Miller (American Studies and American Indian Studies) founded VG/Voices from the Gaps in 1996 to uncover, highlight, and share the works of marginalized artists, predominately women writers of color living and working in North America. The pioneering site's focus was largely educational, aimed at a diverse audience of students in secondary schools and institutions of higher education. Created just as Internet use exploded, VG reached a global readership and cultivated a collaborative and intercommunal group of scholars, students, educators, and women artists. Students, volunteers, and VG readers submitted the majority of the site's entries, including author biographies, book reviews, academic essays, and interviews with women artists. Additionally, the site's creators developed a robust selection of pedagogical materials to help instructors incorporate VG resources in secondary school and undergraduate classrooms.

Hosted by the English department at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, VG underwent two major redesigns during its 18 years as an active website. The first in 2004 expanded the materials included in the collection, incorporating multimedia works, such as interview video/audio files. This project also expanded the scope of the collection to feature women artists regardless of genre of work, race, minority status, or geographical location. The second project three years later updated the site's design and navigation.

VG was decommissioned as an active website in 2014; the site's content is now hosted by the University Digital Conservancy. The transition ensures VG will still be free and accessible over time, and enhances the collection's visibility to search engines such as Google Scholar. Users of VG are still encouraged to use site content in their personal research or in the classroom, but the site is no longer able to accept submissions for new author pages, reviews/essays, or interviews.

If you wish to explore VG/Voices from the Gaps as it existed as an active website, it is archived on the UDC's WebArchive page ( https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-121/*/http://voices.cla.umn.edu/).

Navigating This Site

There are many ways to navigate the VG archives. If you know the author's name, title of the work, time period in which the author lived, or the ethnicity with which the author identified, you may enter it into the search bar. All documents included in this site are full-text searchable, so searching for a term may yield results from several sub-collections.

If you wish to browse the collection, start with one of the sub-collections: Artist Pages, Essays & Reviews, Interviews, and Teaching Materials. These works are arranged reverse-alphabetically for the most part, and each page includes links to the authors of the document (VG volunteers, students, etc.), keywords, a link from which to download the file, and a suggested citation.

If you wish to browse more generally, we suggest beginning with the "Titles" or "Subjects" categories, found by clicking "Browse This Collection" at the top of each collection and sub-collection home page. These categories will allow you to browse alphabetically by document titles or by subject keywords. Choosing "Author" here allows you to see the author(s) of each document-not the woman writer featured in the document.

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Persistent link to this collection: https://hdl.handle.net/11299/164018 About Voices from the Gaps University of Minnesota professors Toni McNaron (English) and Carol Miller (American Studies and American Indian Studies) founded VG/Voices from the Gaps in 1996 to uncover, highlight, and share the works of marginalized artists, predominately women writers of color living and working in North America.

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This blog is a little hard to navigate but it has some helpful pages.

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Reading Recommendations from the staff of the American Writers Museum. We can't recommend these books [...]

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Articles, profiles, reviews, etc.

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AALBC.com, the African American Literature Book Club

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"i curse the phantom belly-
moon, can still hear the
sound of you in still water.
the wind begins to push
a heavy rain, drops spill from
every crevice of the flower.
pouring, the rain always all ways
asks for forgiveness.
a ghost kneels in me,
asks to be spared

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Lift Every Voice is a Library of America project celebrating the rich tradition of African America Poetry. For Fall 2020 we have featured 15 poets from the beginnings of the tradition throughout this current cultural moment. Here, learn more about each poet and explore their works.

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The American Writers Museum has a virtual exhibit highlighting some history of literature and poetry. The target audience is probably high school/jr. high students.

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American Voices

English is our de facto national language, a legacy of colonization. Yet today's Americans speak more than 350 languages, a reflection of the nation's immigrant history and the enduring presence of our indigenous people. Given such diversity, is it possible to say there is a single American literature, a body of work with a distinctive character? In a word, yes.

The authors featured on this site represent the evolution and flourishing of American writing. Writers of the 1600s and 1700s borrowed forms and themes from Europe, applying them to New World settings and issues. Then, over the course of the 1800s, a new, democratic style emerged, rooted in the way Americans talked and thought. Previously underrepresented voices began to be heard, culminated with an explosion of perspectives in the modern era. Taken together, this rich literary heritage reflects America in all of its complexity: its energy, hope, conflict, disillusionment, and creativity.

This online exhibit itself is only a sampling of the expansive American Voices exhibit in the Nation of Writers hall at the American Writers Museum. Along with the timeline of authors exploring the development of an American Voice, there are videos from experts who explore some of the core themes linking these authors together. You can explore some of that content here as well.
To start your literary journey through American history, choose an era spanning from colonial times to the late 20th century or click on one of the themes below.

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English is our de facto national language, a legacy of colonization. Yet today's Americans speak more than 350 languages, a reflection of the nation's immigrant history and the enduring presence of our indigenous people. Given such diversity, is it possible to say there is a single American literature, a body of work with a distinctive character?

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Welcome!

Hello! Welcome to the "New York School: Art, Music, Poetry in Mid-Century America" LibGuide. Here you will find a wide range of resources that will help you jump into research about this subject, no matter what angle you are tackling it. You will find navigation tabs above, as well as a list of topic pages to the left.

What makes this era of American arts and culture unique is that it was distinctly multidisciplinary, is that many of the artists, musicians, and poets (as well as some dancers and dramatists too) were friends and found inspiration from each other's work. So, for example, if you're writing an essay on the poet Frank O'Hara's influence, you wouldn't be able to address the topic completely without knowing a bit about the New York School of painters, as well as poets.

I hope you find this guide helpful. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me; you'll find my contact information on the right of this page.

Have fun!

Who might find this guide useful?

This Guide is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students who have need help with researching on a project on the New York School, abstract expressionism, American art in the 20th century, mid-century poets, etc., or who just have a general interest in this era and would like to pursue it more in-depth but might not know where to begin.

The interdisciplinary nature of this Guide, and the topic it is about, is ideal for small liberal arts schools with particular focus n the arts, or arts schools with multiple programs ranging from painting to creative writing to music.

The Guide is designed with a holistic approach to researching these topics; in addition to many scholarly, authoritative databases reviewed, it also includes some topical books, as well as non-scholarly websites and other resources that might be of interest.

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LibGuides: The New York School: Art, Music, Poetry in Mid-Century America: Home

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A LibGuide for students researching mid-century art, music, and poetry in America.

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Extensive blog on the New York School

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Ad for Locus Solus, in the Wagner Literary Review, 1963 (courtesy of Nick Sturm)

Five years ago today, on May 27, 2013, I launched this blog with a welcome message and only a vague sense of what this site would become.  It’s turned out to be an immensely rewarding and fun side project, and it’s been very gratifying to learn that people seem to have found it useful and enjoyable as well.

Over the past 5 years, I’ve published nearly 300 posts on the poets and artists of the New York School and their milieu, the influences that shaped their work and the long shadow they’ve cast on what has followed in their wake.  Although it wasn’t my primary intention when I started, one of the goals of this blog has been trying to track the surprisingly vast and growing influence these poets have exerted, not only on poetry but across our culture as a whole.  If anything, I’ve found it nearly impossible to keep up with the constant stream of news related to the poets of the New York School – the steady and inspiring appearance of new books, articles, poems, art exhibits, podcasts, and sightings in pop culture and journalism, occasionally punctuated by the inevitable sad news about deaths and the passing of a generation.

Posts have ranged from discussions of indie rock, jazz, film, fiction, and television (and one beloved show’s triumphant rescuing of Frank O’Hara from cultural obscurity (that’s a joke); to “visual footnotes” for famous poems; to recovering interesting ephemera or rare items from the archives; from a photo-essay / walking tour of Frank O’Hara’s New York apartments to anecdotes about Leonard Cohen telling Kenneth Koch to give up poetry for rock music and the time Elizabeth Bishop got high with John Ashbery.

If you’re curious about the range of topics and types of things I’ve posted about here over the past five years, click on the “Categories” and “Archives” drop-down menus on the right side of the screen and browse around.  (And to keep up with new stuff, some of which doesn’t make it on to this blog, be sure to follow the “Locus Solus” Facebook page and my own Twitter account, as well as this site, to get timely updates and information and links about the poets and artists of the New York School).

One wonderful by-product of doing this blog has been getting the chance to hear from so many readers and fans of the New York School.  It has really given me a tangible sense of a wide-ranging community of people who care deeply about poetry and art in general, and in particular about this group of poets, and the art and literature and music they cared about and which they in turn have influenced.

I’ve truly appreciated all the tips, suggestions, review copies, encouragement, etc., from fans of the New York School, fellow scholars and poets, and interested readers — please keep them coming!

I just wanted to take this opportunity on this site’s fifth birthday to thank you for reading and for visiting this site.  As (New York School pal) Robert Creeley would say, onward!

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In the light of the recent emergence (or rather, enactment) of a novel social contract called "post-identity", seen as a way of recognizing the value and potential of cultural diversity, we are going to talk about The Black Arts Movement, one of the most influential art groups from the 20th century.

As part of a greater ideological movement called the Black Power, the African-American artists, poets, speakers, musicians and activists were joined in the wish to define the identity of Black people in America, and to resurge the Black Aesthetic, equally informed by the African tradition and the more recently established ideology influenced by the then-contemporary American life.

But before we proceed discussing the general atmosphere that the men and women of African descent had experienced in the 60's, we must briefly touch upon the history of Black people in America, which will help explain the immense historical importance of the Black Arts Movement.

The Historical Context

Back in the 17th century, the American slave holders tried to distance the enslaved black people from their African heritage and tradition in order to secure their own authoritative positions and to maintain power. The suppression of collective identity was seen as one of the most efficient means of control, and so it was vastly exercised at that time.

Furthermore, and mostly due to similar reasons, the African-Americans had either limited rights or no right at all to get educated properly. However, despite all this, the restrictions didn't make the slaves forget about African culture.

On the contrary, they rendered the overlap of two cultures, the African and the American, all the more authentic. For African-American slaves, storytelling became a way of passing on the tradition and knowledge, which eventually gave birth to oral culture as an idiosyncracy that characterized Black tradition, and remains present as a significant motive to this day[1].

The Power of Words

The potency of the spoken word is what inspired generations of black people to engage in arts and to express themselves through performance, poetry and speech. It might even be said that the limited options that the enslaved Black people had in the past helped them develop certain verbal and artistic skills and master them.

It is not a coincidence that both in the 1920's and the 1960's two significant Black cultural movements emerged mostly with help from language, interactive performance and verbal expression. Still, it should be noted that even though only two specific groups were formally articulated into actual cultural movements, the oral tradition was present throughout the past centuries and it can be seen as an important part of the Black culture in general, regardless of any particular historical context. Verbal and vocal interaction was (and to a certain extent, remains) both a tool and a symbol of Black people in America.

Black Art - The Renaissance

The first of the two aforesaid movements, Harlem Renaissance from the 1920's, was an important step in the way towards cultural recognition and independence, having introduced jazz, blues and swing to the American popular culture. It was also a period in which Black literature was officially being published, although the poets were mostly "on the leash of white patrons and publishing houses".

Thus, the emergence of the second Black renaissance seemed inevitable, and the 1960's finally saw the rise of such movement. Many would agree that the assassination of Malcolm X, the African-American human rights leader (albeit a quite controversial activist), was the key point in the sequence of events that led up to the inauguration of the movement.

However, it is very likely that this kind of organization would have taken place either way, since the atmosphere induced by the Civil Rights Movement, protest poetry and socially engaged Black literature was already pro-revolutionary by itself.

The Black Arts Movement

In March of 1965, less than a month after the death of Malcolm X, a praised African American poet LeRoi Jones (better known as Imamu Amiri Baraka) moved away from his home in Manhattan to start something new in Harlem. This event, equally symbolic in a geo-political context and for Baraka personally, is remarked as the moment in which the movement was born.

Soon after that, Jones founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre / School (BARTS) which became the most important institution of the Black Arts Movement at the time - not as much because of its own history, since it was quite short lived (Baraka moved away from Harlem by the end of the year), but mostly because of its formative influence, the example it had been giving.

However, for the majority of African American poets and writers, it was the 1962 Umbra Workshop that gave impetus to the Black Arts as a literary movement. The group consisted of young Black authors, mostly writers and musicians, with a few members who were involved in visual arts as well. It was based in Manhattan's Lower East Side, which is where Amiri Baraka used to live before he decided to start BARTS in Harlem.

Defining the Black Arts - Theater Groups and Journals

Mainly, the key roles were played by Black theaters and journals that began operating independently, if not differently, from the system established by the white society. Beside its initial purpose as a home for performance, dance, music and drama, the Black theater was used perpetually as a place for lectures, talks, film screenings, meetings and panel discussions. More importantly, it kept the spirit of a productive, activist cultural centre, as opposed to other theatres (black or white), which were either vastly commercialized or restrictive, primarily focused on high art. Its main goal was to expose, as Baraka had suggested in one of his essays from this period.[2]

Black theatres were opening all across the United States - in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. Some of the most famous ones include The New Lafayette Theatre and Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre from New York and The Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) that was situated in Chicago. OBAC attracted visual artist groups as well, whose work inspired mural movements and reportedly influenced the inauguration of Afri Cobra - the African Commune of Bad, Revolutionary Artists.

However, all that was achieved in theatres wouldn't have been as influential had there not been the magazines and journals that popularized Black literature and made it known by the public. The most important magazine to publish Black literature was Negro Digest / Black World, a journal that became famous for high-quality publication content, as it included fiction, poetry, drama, criticism and theoretical articles as well.

Notable Black Artists

The creators and activists who propagated Black Arts all set out to collaboratively establish something referred to as Black aesthetic, a notion that was inscribed within all artistic forms, recognizable in every art genre. It was present in the highly improvisational spontaneity of Jazz music, the melodic aspects of Black poetry, the interactive, expressive approach pursued by African American dancers and performers, etc.

Imamu Amiri Baraka

Widely perceived as the father of the Black Arts Movement, the eminent African American poet was one of the most pertinent figures of the 20th century poetry and drama. Although he was born Everett Leroy Jones, he invented a moniker LeRoi Jones and became connected to other writers of the Beat generation in the late 50's. Since he was already an established artist and play-writer at the time of the advent of the movement, many people find his turn to Black nationalism as a breaking point in the Black Arts history. His biggest contribution was the founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre / School (BARTS), a theatre that operated for a short period of time, but its influence remained strong in the following years. In 1968, he started signing his work under the name Amiri Baraka. By the middle of the 1970's, Baraka became a Marxist, which was one of the main reasons why the Black Arts Movement era ended.

Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni is of the most famous female poets related to the movement, along with Sonia Sanchez and Rosa Guy. The poet has written 30 books of poetry so far and some of the most famous among them have brought her great recognition, after which she was given the Princess of Black Poetry title by the New York Times and the Woman of the Year by Ebony magazine in 1970. Apart from her engagement in writing and poetry, she became known as one of the most devoted advocates of the Hip Hop subculture, which she sees as "a modern day civil rights movement". She has been part of the Virginia Tech faculty teaching staff since 1987, where she is a University Distinguished Professor today.

Jeff Donaldson

Jeff Donaldson is widely considered the most prolific visual authors related to the movement. It is considered that his work, specifically his contribution to the famous Wall of Respect mural, inspired the Outdoor Mural movement that operated later in many American cities. Donaldson was tightly connected with OBAC and Afri-Cobra (which, until some point, was known only as Cobra), listed as a co-founder of both. Donaldson was a propagator of the trans-African aesthetics, which the artist himself described as characterized by " high energy color, rhythmic linear effects, flat patterning, form-filled composition and picture plane compartmentalization.". He was also an educator, a chairman at Howard university, who revolutionized the program and made it what it is today.

Betye Saar

Greatly moved by the work of Joseph Cornell and raised in Los Angeles, Betye Saar came from a slightly different background than most of the community members mentioned previously. However, as much as she was influenced by Cornell's boxes, equal was her desire to acquire identity through artistic expression and to tell stories about African-Americans. Her seminal work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima from 1972, became known as one of the most important Black Arts works. She was famous for her contribution to assemblage, but she was no stranger to printmaking, as another form of appropriation in art. Saar is a respected artist, acclaimed and praised even outside the confines of the United States.

Faith Ringgold

Although she was trained to become a sculptor and educated according to Western standards, Faith Ringgold eventually developed a style of her own that rarely includes classical approach to sculpture. Through her art, Ringgold refers to her African heritage and reflects on her African American identity. The artist became known for her narrative quilts, which she began creating in 1979, after seeing several 14th and 15th century Nepali paintings - thangkas, framed with fabric borders. Many critics agree that this was the key moment in her career, but also a game changer for the textile art genre. Her quilts often illustrated the stories related to life in Harlem, but also the sufferings of African American slaves, reimagined by the artist. Faith made the quilts with the help from her mother, a famous designer.

Significance and Legacy

Although the movement does not exist as such today - the members took separate ways, as their political views started diverging in 1974 - we might be able to recognize its spirit echoing in today's Rhythm and Blues, Gospel, even Hip Hop and Rap music, which come as valid incarnations of the "spoken word" tradition.

On the other hand, the matter of race and identity continues to be an engaging topic that concerns creatives of African descent (which is not to say that the topic does not bother people of other races). Nonetheless, the Black Arts Movement was definitely one of the most successful liberating projects of the 20th century, inasmuch as it was non-violent, inspiring and affirmative, and yet it truly did establish the Black aesthetic as we know it today.

One of the most important aspects and goals of the Black Arts Movements was also the one that made it liable to accusations of being counter-racist (if misinterpreted). Most of the members were not that much interested in evaluating themselves as superimposed against the white race or the rest of America, but were rather concerned with structuring and determining the identity of their own race with regard to itself.

In other words, the African American people openly took pride in being black and worked to improve, or rather to define, a clear perception of themselves. This was, naturally, followed by a certain amount of exclusiveness, but it was necessary in order to fulfill the self-determination that the Black Power Concept aimed to achieve in order to build a reality of its own, independent from the Western system, according to which everything and everyone should be assessed either as similar to or different from the Anglo culture: " Liberation is impossible if we fail to see ourselves in more positive terms. For without a change of vision, we are slaves to the oppressor's ideas and values --ideas and values that finally attack the very core of our existence. Therefore, we must see the world in terms of our own realities.[3]"

Editors' Tip: New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement

This book brings together a collection of seventeen essays that examine and explain the complexity of the Black Arts Movement. It delves into the characteristics that define the movement, relating it to other movements that flourished in the same era and analyzing the political context of the 60's. They touch upon some of the movement's leading propagators, such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Betye Saar, Jeff Donaldson, and Haki Madhubuti.
References:

1. Anonymous, African-American Culture, Wikipedia. [September 4th, 2016]

2. Jones, L., Baraka, A., 1965, The Revolutionary Theatre, National Humanities Center [September 4th, 2016]

3. Neal, L., 1969, Black Art and Black Liberation, University of Virginia [September 4th, 2016]

Featured images in slider: Barbara Jones Hogu - Unite; Martin Luther King, promoting non-violence at a protest; Stokely Carmichael, speaking at the University of California's Greek Theater, 1966. All images used for illustrative purposes only.

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The History of the Black Arts Movement | Widewalls

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In the light of the recent emergence (or rather, enactment) of a novel social contract called "post-identity", seen as a way of recognizing the value and potential of cultural diversity, we are going to talk about The Black Arts Movement, one of the most influential art groups from the 20th century.

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Beginning

The Black Arts Movement was spurned by the assassination of Black Nationalist Leader Malcolm X in 1965. Poet and soon-to-be BAM leader Larry Neal witnessed the assassination. This event affected many members of the African-American community deeply, and especially resonated with those that followed the ideology of Black Nationalism. Soon after the assassination, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) made a symbolic move from Manhattan's Lower East Side to Harlem, which had been a cultural center for African Americans since the 1920s. In Harlem, Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre. This act is seen as marking the beginning of the Black Arts Movement.

Messages

The Black Aesthetic
The Black Aesthetic is a cultural ideology that developed during the Black Arts Movement. It promoted a connection with Black cultural traditions, Black separatism within the arts, and the creation of arts based on the Black experience.

Black Nationalism

Black Nationalism is the political and social thought of African Americans seeking political, economic, and cultural autonomy in American society. Amiri Baraka, the founder of the Black Arts Movement, was a known Black Nationalist during the movement, and those ideas permeated the growth of the movement. Black separatism was a large aspect of Black Nationalism and its influence on the movement was echoed in that ideal being a large part of the Black Aesthetic.

Criticisms

The Black Arts Movement was often criticized as being misogynistic, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and racially exclusive. Many of these criticisms were not necessarily undeserved. The movement was largely lead by men, and those men often produced art focusing on Black masculinity. However, the works produced by Black women during the Black Arts Movement seldom featured misogyny, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. In fact, much of the art by women artists was just the opposite. Their works were often fueled by ideals of Africana womanism, feminism, and in some cases, homosexual pride. They often wrote about their experiences with sexism, misogynoir, motherhood, and homosexuality, all while still incorporating ideals of Black Power and Black Nationalism. Unfortunately, these works were too often overshadowed by the works by male leaders of the Black Arts Movement.

Decline

The Black Arts began to fade in the mid-1970s, around the same time that the Black Power movement started its decline. One of the reasons for the end of the Black Arts Movement was a political switch from nationalism to Marxism made by Amiri Baraka and several other BAM leaders. An organization led by Baraka, the Congress of Afrikan People, officially transitioned from a "Pan Afrikan Nationalist" organization to a "Marxist-Leninist" one in 1974. Many artists of the Black Arts Movement did not agree with Marxist ideals, and this switch caused a separation that weakened the movement.

The Black Arts Movement was also co-opted by Corporate America, another reason for its decline. As mainstream America began to accept some of the art of BAM, major film, record, book, and magazine publishers made efforts to capitalize on the most salable artists. Once a few Black artists were selected by Corporate America, their work was tokenized, and the profitable financial offers made by major publishers could not be matched by smaller Black-owned publishing companies that had flourished during the height of the Movement. These smaller publishers started to fail as more and more Black artists went looking for more profits. The Black Arts Movement never recovered from the economic strain that occurred.

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Research Guides: The Black Arts Movement: Overview

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A helpful resources as a gateway into writing and research on BAM

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If, as a number of scholars have commented over the years, The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was the cultural wing of Black Power, one might also say that Black Power was the political action wing of BAM. In truth, BAM and Black Power were not so much separate entities, but rather, as Larry Neal put it, "concepts" of, or ways of coming at, the black freedom movement. In that way of thinking, art was (or could be) political action just as those activities usually considered to be political were a sort of art.

BAM changed how people felt that art should be circulated. The BAM imperatives of art for, by, of black people in the communities in which they lived as opposed to in elite museums, theaters, or concert halls in which they often felt unwelcome, opened up the cultural landscape for art and arts institutions supported by public money and other resources and aimed at grassroots communities. Not only did the BAM reach millions of people through its journals, presses, theaters, murals, festivals, and television shows during the 1960s and 1970s, but it left a lasting imprint on our sense of what art is, what it can do, and who it is for that remains with us to this day.

- James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

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LibGuides: Black Power Exhibition Resource Guide: Black Arts Movement

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If, as a number of scholars have commented over the years, The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was the cultural wing of Black Power, one might also say that Black Power was the political action wing of BAM.

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Poet Sonia Sanchez was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 9, 1934. Sanchez's mother died a year later, leaving the young girl to be raised by her paternal grandmother, who unlocked her gift for poetry. At age four, Sanchez learned to read, and by the age of six, she began to write. Unfortunately, soon after, Sanchez's grandmother died and the young girl drifted between relatives and family friends. Sanchez went on to spent three decades in Harlem, where she studied creative writing at Hunter College, graduating in 1955.

Sanchez counted the negritude poets among her artistic influences, but also found inspiration from her work as an activist with CORE in New York. While with CORE, Sanchez came into contact with Malcolm X, whose direct truthfulness moved her to write blunt, passionate, and painfully honest poetry about the African American experience.

In 1976, Sanchez settled in Philadelphia, and the following year became, chairperson of the English Department at Temple University. During the course of her career, Sanchez wrote several books and collections of poetry that captured, often with wrenching emotion, the plight of her community. Sanchez found herself profoundly affected by the 1985 bombing of a house full of black political radicals affiliated with MOVE, and eulogized them in Elegy: For Move and Philadelphia. Sanchez's 1984 book Homegirls and Handgrenades: Poems won the American Book Award the following year. Some of Sanchez's other noteworthy works include: Under a Soprano Sky (1987); Wounded in the House of a Friend (1997); and Shake Loose My Skin (2000).

Sanchez received several awards for her work both as a poet and an activist. Sanchez traveled around the world to read her poetry, and also wrote children's fiction and plays.

Interview Description (Finding Aids)

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Poet Sonia Sanchez was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 9, 1934. Sanchez's mother died a year later, leaving the young girl to be raised by her paternal grandmother, who unlocked her gift for poetry. At age four, Sanchez learned to read, and by the age of six, she began to write.

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"Make it new!" This exhortation by the American poet Ezra Pound sums up the Modernist agenda in one short phrase.

Acccording to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, 7th edition:

Modernism is... best understood as an epoch of radical cultural upheaval which flourished predominantly in Europe and the USA from, arguably, around the last quarter of the 19th century to, no less debatably, around the start of the Second World War. [Modernism] represent[s] modernist culture's uncompromising confrontation with and sense of severance from the conventions and tastes of both mass society and the governing elite and its determination to rebuild and renew the arts.

For a more in-depth overview of "Modernism," what it was, and how it manifested itself in architecture, music, dance, and literature, click the link directly below to read about it from the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.

Click here to read the "Modernism" overview.

This webpage is designed to assist the researcher, whether undergraduate, graduate student, or faculty member in finding information available through the Gumberg Library on American Modernist authors ant their works. It directs users to:

Reference works, both print and electronic, great for learning the basics about a topic

Books, by and about these authors and their work, as well as themes related to modernist literature, from the QuickSearch online catalog

Periodical databases giving access to citations to articles, popular and scholarly (many in full-text)

Information on citation

Information on how to get materials from other libraries

Use the tabs at the top of the screen to access the various sorts of information.

If at any time in your research your need help, click Ask Gumberg. Or you can contact me, Ted Bergfelt, the creator of this page. Click toSend Email, or phone me at 412.396.5351.

The artwork in the banner images at top and bottom of most pages is a detail from the work Composition A, by Piet Mondrian, painted in 1920. It is in the public domain in the US, because it was created before 1926. Source: Wikimedia Commons. While Mondrian was born in the Netherlands, he spent the last years of his life in the United States.

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LibGuides: American Modernist Writers: Home

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"Make it new!" This exhortation by the American poet Ezra Pound sums up the Modernist agenda in one short phrase. Acccording to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, 7th edition: Modernism is...

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Lesson Plans for teaching Modernist Poetry

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Lesson Plans for teaching Modernist Poetry

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The disorienting nature and uncertainty of modernist poetry often makes it a challenge for students. Along with analyzing modernist poems critically, this curriculum also focuses on the historical context that gives rise to the modernist movement's content and style.

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Lesson Plans for teaching the Harlem Renaissance 

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Lesson Plans for teaching the Harlem Renaissance 

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These lesson plans combine poetry with art and music as well.

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Lesson Overview

Artists of the Harlem Renaissance, including Jacob Lawrence, wanted to show the beauty of Black people and counter the negative stereotypes and racist beliefs held by society.

In this lesson, students will:

Explore prominent artists and artworks of the Harlem Renaissance

Identify major themes portrayed by these artists

Create artwork based on themes of the Harlem Renaissance

Part 1: An Artistic Explosion
Introduce:

Watch this short video on the Harlem Renaissance from HISTORY.

As students are watching, they should take notes in response to the following questions:

What was the Harlem Renaissance?

What was the goal of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance?

What different kinds of art by African Americans were prominent during the Harlem Renaissance and who were some of the most famous artists of this time?
If necessary, define "prominent" for students: most famous or well known.

What impact did the Great Depression have on the Harlem Renaissance?

What is the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance?
If necessary, define "legacy" for students: something that's been left behind for future generations.

After watching the video, have students share their responses to the questions.

Part 2: A Closer Look
Analyze:

In partners, students will examine three artistic works from the Harlem Renaissance to IDENTIFY the major themes often portrayed by Harlem Renaissance artists. (Note: Select from this list the works best suited for your students. Consider their ability to handle difficult topics, reading levels, and prior knowledge on race relations following the Civil War.)

Students will use this Investigating Art guided questions exercise to analyze each piece of art. There is a separate set of questions for visual art, poems, and music. Use the corresponding graphic organizer(s) based on the artistic works you selected for your students.

Part 3: Themes of the Harlem Renaissance

After analyzing each artistic work, students will compare the three artistic pieces using this Comparing Art guided questions exercise.

Once students have finished comparing the artworks, have them develop a list of major themes of the Harlem Renaissance that they noticed. Common themes you may want to address with your students include: the lasting influence of slavery, Black identity, the effects of institutional racism, the dilemmas of performing and writing for elite white audiences, and how to convey the experience of modern black life in the urban North. They can also use these themes for the Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance lesson.

1. Have students select one of the themes from your class list about the major themes of the Harlem Renaissance.

2. Students then write down a one-sentence statement in response to the question: What do I want to say about this theme?
For example: If a student selects "Black identity" as the theme on which they want to focus, their response to this question could be "Black is beautiful."

3. Building upon their responses, students create artworks to represent their statements responding to a major theme of the Harlem Renaissance:

Brainstorm ways to represent the statements. What will be the most important components to convey in the artwork?

Select a medium for representing the statement, such as poetry, song lyrics, short story, visual art.

Create the artwork representing the statement.

4. Create a classroom gallery:

Each student presents on the theme they selected and the statement they wanted to make with their art.

Students explore each other's artworks and reflect on how they all chose to represent the themes.

Additional Context

Lesson Context

In the 1920s, Harlem became a coveted address. The neighborhood in New York City was synonymous with an outpouring of production in the visual arts, music, literature, theater, and dance that some began referring to the creative era as the Harlem Renaissance.

Famous artists of the Harlem Renaissance included: sociologist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois, writers Claude McKay, Langton Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, musician Duke Ellington, and entertainer Josephine Baker.These artists strived to express their racial identity and pride.

Jacob Lawrence, an artist of the Harlem Renaissance, believed his paintings were "a portrait of myself, a portrait of my community." The community he grew up around included artist and mentor Charles Alston and leading philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke.

The people of Harlem and their rich heritage were constant sources of inspiration for Lawrence. The community experience-its triumphs and tragedies, its dreams and disappointments, its pleasures and humility, collectively forged by the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Depression era-lives on in his paintings.

Key Terms

306 Workshop: A collective made up of artists, musicians, and writers who rented studio space at 306 West 141st Street in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem Renaissance: The largest concentration of African Americans who migrated during the Great Migration moved to Harlem. From the 1910s to mid-1930s, the neighborhood of Harlem in New York City became a hub of African American culture, with an explosion of literature, music, theater, and the arts.

Institutional Racism: A form of racism (prejudice and discrimination based on race and the belief that your own race is superior) in social and political institutions. Specifically, institutional racism is reflected in discriminatory practices, policies, and behaviors within spheres such as economics, the criminal justice system, education, employment, housing, health care, income, and political power.

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Artists of the Harlem Renaissance, including Jacob Lawrence, wanted to show the beauty of Black people and counter the negative stereotypes and racist beliefs held by society. In this lesson, students will: Explore prominent artists and artworks of the Harlem Renaissance Identify major themes portrayed by these artists Create artwork based on themes of the Harlem Renaissance Introduce: Watch this short video on the Harlem Renaissance from HISTORY.

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The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

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The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

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I think this work by Langston Hughes can be read as a kind of poetics statement for the Harlem Renaissance

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One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet-not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white."(1) And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America-this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

But let us look at the immediate background of this young poet. His family is of what I suppose one would call the Negro middle class: people who are by no means rich yet never uncomfortable nor hungry-smug, contented, respectable folk, members of the Baptist church. The father goes to work every morning. He is a chief steward at a large white club. The mother sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties for the rich families of the town. The children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says "Don't be like niggers" when the children are bad. A frequent phrase from the father is, "Look how well a white man does things." And so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of "I want to be white" runs silently through their minds. This young poet's home is, I believe, a fairly typical home of the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.

For racial culture the home of a self-styled "high-class" Negro has nothing better to offer. Instead there will perhaps be more aping of things white than in a less cultured or less wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner, or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or a teacher, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman he could find. The family attend a fashionable church where few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a color line. In the North they go to white theaters and white movies. And in the South they have at least two cars and house "like white folks." Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people.

But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority-may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let's dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him-if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who canescape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their "white" culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country, with their innumerable overtones and undertones, surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears. But let us look again at the mountain.

A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs. But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of going to hear "that woman," Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing Negro folksongs.(2) And many an upper-class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its services. The drab melodies in white folks' hymnbooks are much to be preferred. "We want to worship the Lord correctly and quietly. We don't believe in 'shouting.' Let's be dull like the Nordics," they say, in effect.

The road for the serious black artist, then, who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people. The fine novels of Chesnutt go out of print with neither race noticing their passing. The quaint charm and humor of Dunbar's dialect verse brought to him, in his day, largely the same kind of encouragement one would give a sideshow freak (A colored man writing poetry! How odd!) or a clown (How amusing!).(3)

The present vogue in things Negro, although it may do as much harm as good for the budding colored artist, has at least done this: it has brought him forcibly to the attention of his own people among whom for so long, unless the other race had noticed him beforehand, he was a prophet with little honor.(4) I understand that Charles Gilpin acted for years in Negro theaters without any special acclaim from his own, but when Broadway gave him eight curtain calls, Negroes, too, began to beat a tin pan in his honor.(5) I know a young colored writer, a manual worker by day, who had been writing well for the colored magazines for some years, but it was not until he recently broke into the white publications and his first book was accepted by a prominent New York publisher that the "best" Negroes in his city took the trouble to discover that he lived there. Then almost immediately they decided to give a grand dinner for him. But the society ladies were careful to whisper to his mother that perhaps she'd better not come. They were not sure she would have an evening gown.(6)

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. "O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are," say the Negroes. "Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you," say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write "Cane." The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read "Cane" hate it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du Bois) "Cane" contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial.(7)

But in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and the desires of some white editors we have an honest American Negro literature already with us. Now I await the rise of the Negro theater. Our folk music, having achieved world-wide fame, offers itself to the genius of the great individual American Negro composer who is to come. And within the next decade I expect to see the work of a growing school of colored artists who paint and model the beauty of dark faces and create with new technique the expressions of their own soul-world. And the Negro dancers who will dance like flame and the singers who will continue to carry our songs to all who listen-they will be with us in even greater numbers tomorrow.

Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am as sincere as I know how to be in these poems and yet after every reading I answer questions like these from my own people: Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes? I wish you wouldn't read some of your poems to white folks. How do you find anything interesting in a place like a cabaret? Why do you write about black people? You aren't black. What makes you do so many jazz poems?

But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul-the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created it and she does not like me to write about it, The old subconscious "white is best" runs through her mind. Years of study under white teachers, a lifetime of white books, pictures, and papers, and white manners, morals, and Puritan standards made her dislike the spirituals. And now she turns up her nose at jazz and all its manifestations-likewise almost everything else distinctly racial. She doesn't care for the Winold Reiss portraits of Negroes because they are "too Negro."(8) She does not want a true picture of herself from anybody. She wants the artist to flatter her, to make the white world believe that all Negroes are as smug and as near white in soul as she wants to be. But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro-and beautiful!"

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet," as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange un-whiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty.(9) We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

NOTES

(1) Hughes is likely referring to Countee Cullen (1903-1962), a classically trained African American writer whose poems largely adhered to European traditions of form and meter.

(2) Raquel Meller (1888-1962), popular Spanish singer and actress; Clara Smith (1895-1935), African American blues singer who incorporated vaudeville and comedy routines into her shows, which often contained risqué sexual references.

(3) Charles Waddell Chestnutt (1858-1932), prolific African American writer best known for his conjure tales and his novels of social purpose dealing with the psychological and social costs of the color line; Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), African American poet, novelist, and short story writer, was both praised and chastised for his dialect poems, which some critics felt reinforced popular stereotypes of a romanticized Old South.

(4) Hughes is referring to what is now known as the Harlem Renaissance, a sociocultural movement of the 1920s that witnessed a florescence of African American literary, musical, and visual arts. During this period many whites, fascinated with African American art and culture, made trips to Harlem to experience its exciting nightlife.

(5) Charles Gilpin (1878-1930) became the first African American to be widely recognized as a serious actor when the played the title role in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones in the early 1920s.

(6) Hughes is likely referring to himself in this anecdote.

(7) With its blend of short fiction, poetry, arcane line sketches, Cane, published in 1923, is considered one of the most stylistically sophisticated works of the Harlem Renaissance, but it offended some critics with its frank representations of sexuality and racial violence. Jean Toomer (1894-1967) considered Cane a swan song, a final mediation on his own conflicted relationship with African America and the rural South. After its publication, Toomer refused to be classified as a black writer. Paul Robeson (1898-1976), renowned African American singer, actor, and advocate for global human rights.

(8) Winold Reiss (1888-1953), German artist whose portraits of African Americans were featured in Alain Locke's Harlem Renaissance anthology, The New Negro.

(9) Bessie Smith (1894-1937), the "Empress of the Blues," made over eighty recordings during her short career; Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934), was a leading African American novelist, short story writer, and essayist during the Harlem Renaissance; Aaron Douglas (1898-1979), once referred to as the "Dean of African American painters," was encouraged by Winold Reiss to incorporate African motifs into his art.

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The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain by... | Poetry Foundation

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One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet-not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write...

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The (Gay) Harlem Renaissance | The History You Didn't Learn

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An important collection by the "dean" of the Harlem Renaissance

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The new Negro : an interpretation / edited by Alain Locke ; book decoration and portraits by Winold Reiss : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Librarian

Welcome!

In this libguide, you will find all of the resources you need to begin studying the poets of Black Mountain College, also known as the "Black Mountain School." You will find an overview of the College, its guiding philosophy and culture, biographies and major works of the key poets, helpful texts for understanding their poetics, and links to pictures and other helpful resources.

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LibGuides: The Black Mountain Poets: Home

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Poetics for the Black Mountain poets

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PROJECTIVE VERSE[1]

(projectile (percussive (prospective

The NON-Projective
(or what a French critic[2] calls "closed" verse, that verse which print bred and which is pretty much what we have had, in English & American, and have still got, despite the work of Pound & Williams: it led Keats, already a hundred years ago, to see it (Wordsworth's, Milton's) in the light of "the Egotistical Sublime";[3] and it persists, at this latter day, as what you might call the private-soul-at-any-public-wall)
Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings. (The revolution of the ear, 1910,[4] the trochee's heave,[5] asks it of the younger poets.)

I want to do two things: first, try to show what projective or OPEN verse is, what it involves, in its act of composition, how, in distinction from the non-projective, it is accomplished; and II, suggest a few ideas about what stance toward reality brings such verse into being, what the stance does, both to the poet and to his reader. (The stance involves, for example, a change beyond, and larger than, the technical, and may, the way things look, lead to a new poetics and to new concepts from which some sort of drama, say, or of epic, perhaps, may emerge.)

I

First, some simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN, or what can also be called COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the "old" base of the non-projective.

(1) the kinetics of the thing.[6] A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is the third term, will take away?

This is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is specially confronted by. And it involves a whole series of new recognitions. From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION-puts himself in the open-he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined. (It is much more, for example, this push, than simply such a one as Pound put, so wisely, to get us started: "the musical phrase,"[7] go by it, boys, rather than by, the metronome.)

(2) is the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composition, and, when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can come into being. It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. (Or so it got phrased by one, R. Creeley,[8] and it makes absolute sense to me, with this possible corollary, that right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand.) There it is, brothers, sitting there, for USE.

Now (3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg[9]): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!

So there we are, fast, there's the dogma. And its excuse, its usableness, in practice. Which gets us, it ought to get us, inside the machinery, now, 1950, of how projective verse is made.

If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and ahead. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath.

Let's start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable. It is the king and pin of versification, what rules and holds together the lines, the larger forms, of a poem. I would suggest that verse here and in England dropped this secret from the late Elizabethans to Ezra Pound, lost it, in the sweetness of meter and rime, in a honey-head. (The syllable is one way to distinguish the original success of blank verse, and its falling off, with Milton.)

It is by their syllables that words juxtapose in beauty, by these particles of sound as clearly as by the sense of the words which they compose. In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously, the obedience of his ear to the syllables. The fineness, and the practice, lie here, at the minimum and source of speech.

O western wynd, when wilt thou blow[10]
And the small rain down shall rain
O Christ that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again

It would do no harm, as an act of correction to both prose and verse as now written, if both rime and meter, and, in the quantity words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine creature, were more allowed to lead the harmony on. With this warning, to those who would try: to step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless-and least logical. Listening for the syllables must be so constant and so scrupulous, the exaction must be so complete, that the assurance of the ear is purchased at the highest-40 hours a day-price. For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance:

"Is" comes from the Aryan root,[11] as, to breathe. The English "not" equals the Sanscrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish. "Be" is from bhu, to grow.

I say the syllable, king, and that it is spontaneous, this way: the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind's, that it has the mind's speed . . .

it is close, another way: the mind is brother to this sister and is, because it is so close, is the drying force, the incest, the sharpener . . .

it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born.

But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse (always, that Egyptian thing, it produces twins!). The other child is the LINE. And together, these two, the syllable and the line, they make a poem, they make that thing, the-what shall we call it, the Boss of all, the "Single Intelligence." And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending-where its breathing, shall come to, termination.

The trouble with most work, to my taking, since the breaking away from traditional lines and stanzas, and from such wholes as, say, Chaucer's Troilus or S's Lear, is: contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE WHERE THE LINE IS BORN.

Let me put it baldly. The two halves are:

the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE

And the joker? that it is in the 1st half of the proposition that, in composing, one lets-it-rip; and that it is in the 2nd half, surprise, it is the LINE that's the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control, that it is right here, in the line, that the shaping takes place, each moment of the going.

I am dogmatic, that the head shows in the syllable. The dance of the intellect is there, among them, prose or verse. Consider the best minds you know in this here business: where does the head show, is it not, precise, here, in the swift currents of the syllable? can't you tell a brain when you see what it does, just there? It is true, what the master says he picked up from Confusion: all the thots men are capable of can be entered on the back of a postage stamp. So, is it not the PLAY of a mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at all?

And the threshing floor for the dance? Is it anything but the LINE? And when the line has, is, a deadness, is it not a heart which has gone lazy, is it not, suddenly, slow things, similes, say, adjectives, or such, that we are bored by?

For there is a whole flock of rhetorical devices which have now to be brought under a new bead, now that we sight within the line. Simile is only one bird who comes down, too easily. The descriptive functions generally have to be watched, every second, in projective verse, because of their easiness, and thus their drain on the energy which composition by field allows into a poem. Any slackness takes off attention, that crucial thing, from the job in hand, from the push of the line under hand at the moment, under the reader's eye, in his moment. Observation of any kind is, like argument in prose, properly previous to the act of the poem, and, if allowed in, must be so juxtaposed, apposed, set in, that it does not, for an instant, sap the going energy of the content toward its form.

It comes to this, this whole aspect of the newer problems. (We now enter, actually, the large area of the whole poem, into the FIELD, if you like, where all the syllables and all the lines must be managed in their relations to each other.) It is a matter, finally of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used. This is something I want to get to in another way in Part II, but, for the moment, let me indicate this, that every element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem just as solidly as we are accustomed to take what we call the objects of reality; and that these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world.

The objects which occur at every given moment of composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem, must be handled as a series of objects in field in such a way that a series of tensions (which they also are) are made to hold, and to hold exactly inside the content and the context of the poem which has forced itself, through the poet and them, into being.

Because breath allows all the speech-force of language back in (speech is the "solid" of verse, is the secret of a poem's energy), because, now, a poem has, by speech, solidity, everything in it can now be treated as solids, objects, things; and, though insisting upon the absolute difference of the reality of verse from that other dispersed and distributed thing, yet each of these elements of a poem can be allowed to have the play of their separate energies and can be allowed, once the poem is well composed, to keep, as those other objects do, their proper confusions.

Which brings us up, immediately, bang, against tenses, in fact against syntax, in fact against grammar generally, that is, as we have inherited it. Do not tenses, must they not also be kicked around anew, in order that time, that other governing absolute may be kept, as must the space-tensions of a poem, immediate, contemporary to the acting-on-you of the poem? I would argue that here, too, the LAW OF THE LINE, which projective verse creates, must be hewn to, obeyed, and that the conventions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line. But an analysis of how far a new poet can stretch the very conventions on which communication by language rests, is too big for these notes, which are meant, I hope it is obvious, merely to get things started.

Let me just throw in this. It is my impression that all parts of speech suddenly, in composition by field, are fresh for both sound and percussive use, spring up like unknown, unnamed vegetables in the patch, when you work it, come spring. Now take Hart Crane. What strikes me in him is the singleness of the push to the nominative, his push along that one arc of freshness, the attempt to get back to word as handle. (If logos is word as thought, what is word as noun, as, pass me that, as Newman Shea[12] used to ask, at the galley table, put a jib on the blood, will ya.) But there is a loss in Crane of what Fenollosa is so right about, in syntax,[13] the sentence as first act of nature, as lightning, as passage of force from subject to object, quick, in this case, from Hart to me, in every case, from me to you, the VERB, between two nouns. Does not Hart miss the advantages, by such an isolated push, miss the point of the whole front of syllable, line, field, and what happened to all language, and the poem, as a result?

I return you now to London, to beginnings, to the syllable, for the pleasures of it, to intermit;

If music be the food of love, play on,
give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
the appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again. It had a dying fall,
o, it came over my ear like the sweet sound
that breathes upon a bank of violets,
stealing and giving odour.[14]

What we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination. For the breath has a double meaning which latin had not yet lost.[15]

The irony is, from the machine has come one gain not yet sufficiently observed or used, but which leads directly on toward projective verse and its consequences. 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 has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.

It is time we picked the fruits of the experiments of Cummings, Pound, Williams, each of whom has, after his way, already used the machine as a scoring to his composing, as a script to its vocalization. It is now only a matter of the recognition of the conventions of composition by field for us to bring into being an open verse as formal as the closed, with all its traditional advantages.

If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as the phrase before it, he means that space to be held, by the breath, an equal length of time. If he suspends a word or syllable at the end of a line (this was most Cummings' addition) he means that time to pass that it takes the eye-that hair of time suspended-to pick up the next line. If he wishes a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma-which is an interruption of the meaning rather than the sounding of the line-follow him when he uses a symbol the typewriter has ready to hand:

What does not change / is the will to change[16]

Observe him, when he takes advantage of the machine's multiple margins, to juxtapose:

Sd he:

to dream takes no effort
to think is easy
to act is more difficult
but for a man to act after he has taken thought, this!
is the most difficult of all[17]

Each of these lines is a progressing of both the meaning and the breathing forward, and then a backing up, without a progress or any kind of movement outside the unit of time local to the idea.

There is more to be said in order that is convention be recognized, especially in order that the revolution out of which it came may be so forwarded that work will get published to offset the reaction now afoot to return verse to inherited forms of cadence and rime. But what I want to emphasize here, by this emphasis on the typewriter as the personal and instantaneous recorder of the poet's work, is the already projective nature of verse as the sons of Pound and Williams are practicing it. Already they are composing as though verse was to have the reading its writing involved, as though not the eye but the ear was to be its measurer, as though the intervals of its composition could be so carefully put down as to be precisely the intervals of its registration. For the ear, which once had the burden of memory to quicken it (rime & regular cadence were its aids and have merely lived on in print after the oral necessities were ended) can now again, that the poet has his means, be the threshold of projective verse.

II

Which gets us to what I promised, the degree to which the projective involves a stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance towards the reality of a poem itself. It is a matter of content, the content of Homer or of Euripides or of Seami[18] as distinct from that which I might call the more "literary" masters. From the moment the projective purpose of the act of verse is recognized, the content does-it will-change. If the beginning and the end is breath, voice in its largest sense, then the material of verse shifts. It has to. It starts with the composer. The dimension of his line itself changes, not to speak of the change in his conceiving, of the matter he will turn to, of the scale in which he imagines that matter's use. I myself would pose the difference by a physical image. It is no accident that Pound and Williams both were involved variously in a movement which got called "objectivism."[19] But that word was then used in some sort of a necessary quarrel, I take it, with "subjectivism." It is now too late to be bothered with the latter. It has excellently done itself to death, even though we are all caught in its dying. What seems to me a more valid formulation for present use is "objectism," a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it. Objectism is the getting ride of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the "subject" and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages, the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use.

It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist's act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man's problem, the moment he takes speed up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. This is not easy. Nature works from reverence, even in her destruction (species go down with a crash). But breath is man's special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself (in his physiology, if you like, but the life in him, for all that) then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size.

It is projective size that the play, The Trojan Women,[20] possesses, for it is able to stand, is it not, as its people do, beside the Aegean-and neither Andromache or the sea suffer diminution. In a less "heroic" but equally "natural" dimension Seami causes the Fisherman and the Angel to stand clear in Hagoromo.[21] And Homer, who is such an unexamined cliché that I do not think I need to press home in what scale Nausicaa's girls wash their clothes.

Such works, I should argue-and I use them simply because their equivalents are yet to be done-could not issue from men who conceived verse without the full relevance of human voice, without reference to where lines come from, in the individual who writes. Nor do I think it accident at that, at this end point of the argument, I should use, for examples, two dramatists and an epic poet. For I would hazard the guess that, if projective verse is practiced long enough, is drive ahead hard enough along the course I think it dictates, verse again can carry much larger material than it has carried in our language since the Elizabethans. But it can't be jumped. We are only at hits beginnings, and if I think that the Cantos make more "dramatic" sense than do the plays of Mr. Eliot, it is not because I think they have solved the problem but because the methodology of the verse in them points a way by which, one day, the problem of larger content and of larger forms may be solved. Eliot is, in fact, a proof of a present danger, of "too easy" a going on the practice of verse as it has been, rather than as it must be, practiced. There is no question, for example, that Eliot's line, from "Prufrock"[22] on down, has speech-force, is "dramatic," is, in fact, one of the most notable lines since Dryden. I suppose it stemmed immediately to him from Browning, as did so many of Pound's early things. In any case Eliot's line has obvious relations backward to the Elizabethans, especially to the soliloquy. Yet O. M. Eliot is not projective. It could even be argued (and I say this carefully, as I have said all things about the non-projective, having considered how each of us must save himself after his own fashion and how much, for that matter, each of us owes to the non-projective, and will continue to owe, as both go alongside each other) but it could be argued that it is because Eliot has stayed inside the non-projective that he fails as a dramatist-that his root is the mind alone, and a scholastic mind at that (no high intelletto despite his apparent clarities)-and that, in his listenings he has stayed there where the ear and the mind are, has only gone from his fine ear outward rather than, as I say a projective poet will, down through the workings of his own throat to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings, where drama, has to come from, where, the coincidence is, all acts spring.

NOTES

[1] Olson's most influential essay, "Projective Verse," was written and rewritten correspondence with Fances Bolderoff and Robert Creeley, and printed in Poetry New York, no. 3, 1950; reprinted many times, first (in part) in The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), but also in the pamphlet Projective Verse (New York: Totem, 1959), in The New American Poetry 1945-1960, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960), in HU, and in SW. The title draws on a number of sources, including "projective geometry" (which Olson knew from his readings in Bonola, Coxeter, and Weyl; see "Equal, That is, to the Real Itself"), and the "projective art" of theater (which Olson taught in 1952 at Black Mountain College; his course description emphasized "the usages of the poet historically and again now as the root of drama" [ OJ 2: 27]).

"Projective Verse" offers an early crystallization of Olson's poetics, but following Edward Dahlberg's dictum "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER," Olson continued to press forward in his research. Attempts at a sequel include the 1959 "Letter to Elaine Feinstein" and two separate unpublished essays called "Projective Verse II," [published posthumously in 2010 by Chax Press, edited by Joshua Hoeynck], one dated 1956, the other 1959. In the earlier of these, Olson asks:

Has language only that property, that it enables the poet to traffic in between his self and your self, trading his terms for yours, and getting no more power out of it than your acknowledgment that he speaks for you? But does he, even at his best? Can he, when you are your own involvement, and so engaged, willy-nilly, poems or no poems? You will speak in the next second by words which are, I propose, prior to all you are, and more necessary to you, if you are properly engaged with what it is to be human, than your toes, or your opposable thumb, that if you move as man has since either he or nature raised him to speech, to the capacity to speak, you move with or against yourself-you have more or less life-exactly to the degree that language empowers you. (Storrs, Prose Series)

Notwithstanding his essay's predominately literary focus, Olson's ultimate interest in the concept of "Projective Verse" is phenomenological, something that becomes especially clear in an unpublished prose piece from 1965, "The Projective, in Poetry and in Thought; and the Paratactic." Here Olson develops a notion of "practice" that far outstrips the emphasis on verse-making of the 1950 essay:

my interest, in adding the paratactic to any previous though on the projective (prospective prescriptive eternal) is to assume, by experience, that the poetry and the thought called purposive behavior "practice" requires some different mode of action-activity literally, living around the clock, eating even, making love differently finding yourself engaged in an impossible war with the realistic, and with realistic people-

. . . my . . . point would be . . . that syntax . . . or the order of all movement . . . has a name for itself parataxis

Aristotle called it the way beads are strung on a string one bead and thread after another And there is that sense that it is one foot after the previous foot that nothing doesn't happen expect as succession, and with that order of succession in time... known only if you do yourself place one next thing after one you have definitely expressed the placing of, like your foot the step before-etc the succession in time being solely the experience in terms of a different & known & palpable order-physical, literally, & temporal . . .

Something like it anyway wld be the dream of the success of what is also the usefulness, of what I have called the Projective (Storrs, Prose Series)

[2] Identified by Ralph Maud as René Nelli, who asks in Poésie overte poésie fermée, "Mais y a-t-il une poésie ouverte sur le reel et un poésie fermée sur les mots? - "But is there a poetry open on the real and a poetry closed on the words?" ( Olson's Reading, pp. 84 and 277 n. 29).

[3] Keats's description of Wordsworth, from a letter to Richard Woodhouse of 27 October 1818:

As to the poetical Character (I mean that sort, of which, if I am anything, I am a member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian, or egotistical Sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone,) it is not itself-it has no self-it is everything and nothing-It has no character-it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated-It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. (The Letters of John Keats, p. 184)

[4] The year 1910 (Olson's own birth year) is in many ways a magnet, accruing facts the way a magnet gathers iron filings. In his 1946 poem "La Préface," Olson drew the date thus:

( ) 1910 (

It is not obscure. We are the new born...
...........................................................................
The closed parenthesis reads: the dead bury the dead,
and it is not very interesting
Open, the figure stands at the door, horror his
and gone, possessed, o new Osiris, Odysseus ship.

John Clarke in his notes for Olson's fall 1964 Mythology Seminar provides an alternative gloss:

Then the psychic awakening came:

1903 Gertrude Stein, Quod Erat Demonstrandum

(pub. 1950 as Things as They Are)

1909 Stein, Three Lives!

Pound, Exultations, Personae

The Phenomenology of Perception of the 20th c. ended the Neolithic period, 1910-the return of the possibility of a paratactic poetics, as with Pleistocene man, when poetry and mythology were one, mythos-logos intact.

[5] Writing Robert Creeley on 22 June 1950, Olson has: "THE TROCHEE: with it, a new language, for USE, made USA (where'd he get it, the trochee? Hunch: out of Miss Sappho by Seafarer" ( O/RC 1: 140). The "he" here is Pound, who has in Canto 81, "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave."

[6] In an early version of his essay "Human Universe," Olson writes:

To repossess ourselves of a methodology of expression which shall be the equal of the laws which so richly determine the original function which we call human life-this, surely, is the task. And I have elsewhere argued that the first principle is, that if you propose to transfer power you must manage in the process of the transfer a kinetic at least the equal of the thing from which you begin. Which is why we will do nothing until we front what we are, precisely, the conditions of a human being, what is, exactly, the nature of a human life. (Glover diss., p. 271)

[7] In the third of three principles given in "A Retrospect," e.g., "As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome ( The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot [New York: New Directions, 1968], p. 3).

[8] In a letter dated 5 June 1950, by way of distinguishing "from" from "technical wonder," the latter of which he describes as

Absolute bull/shit. That is: the intelligence that had touted Auden as being a technical wonder, etc. Lacking all grip on the worn and useless character of his essence: thought. An attitude that puts weight, first: on form/more than say: what you have above: will never get to: content. Never in god's world. Anyhow, form has now become so useless a term/ that I blush to use it. I wd imply a little of Stevens' use (the things created in a poem and existing there...) & too, go over into: the possible casts of method for a way into/a 'subject': to make it clear: that form is never more than an extension of content. An enacted or possible 'stasis' for thought. ( O/RC 1: 78-79)

[9] Apparently in conversation. John Cech in Charles Olson and Edward Dahlberg: A Portrait of a Friendship (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1982) quotes an unpublished loose manuscript note of Olson's from 1945, "Go to the extreme of your imagination and go on from there: fail large, never succeed small. Again ED makes sense: one intuition must only lead to another farther place" (pp. 88-89).

[10] Anonymous poem from the sixteenth century.

[11] Lifted by Olson (along with other lines) form "Mouths Biting Empty Air," an unpublished prose piece dated 27 October 1946, now at Storrs.

[12] A Gloucester fisherman named also in "Letter 20" of the Maximus poems ( MAX 89, 91), in "The Morning News" ( CP 122), and in Olson's 1936 "Journal of Swordfishing Cruise on the Doris M. Hawes" ( OJ 7:10, 19).

[13] Hart Crane and Ernest Fenollosa (the latter discusses syntax in The Chinese Written Character). The criticism of Crane was later lodged by Olson against Robin Blaser as well-wit, "Id' trust you anywhere with image, but you're got no syntax." See See Minutes of the Charles Olson Society, no. 8 ("A Special Issue for the Robin Blaser Conference"), p. 13.

[14] Shakespeare's Twelfth Night 1.1.1-17.

[15] "Spiritus" -both breath and spirit.

[16] Opening line of Olson's poem "The Kingfishers" ( CP 86)

[17] From Olson's "The Praises" ( CP 98)

[18] A Japanese writer of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, also known as Motekiyo. In 1961, after reading a version of Seami's Yashima in Origin, Olson wrote Cid Corman, "If you find anyone who has translated Seami's Autobiography literally & entirely I shd be obliged to hear of it. I remain convinced of its importance (reading his new play you published emphasizes again what a flawless poet he is" ( O/CC 2 : 173).

[19] The work of a loosely affiliated group of poets first published by Louis Zukofsky in a special issue of Poetry magazine in 1931.

[20] The Trojan Women By Euripides.

[21] One of the Noh plays translated by Pound, whose introductory note declares, "The play shows the relation of the early Noh to the God-dance" ( Ezra Pound: Translations [New York: New Directions, 1963], p. 308).

[22] T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

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Projective Verse by Charles Olson | Poetry Foundation

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PROJECTIVE VERSE[1] (projectile (percussive (prospective The NON-Projective (or what a French critic[2] calls "closed" verse, that verse which print bred and which is pretty much what we have had, in English & American, and have still got, despite the work of Pound & Williams: it led Keats, already a hundred

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Transcendentalism and Florence + the Machine

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Transcendentalism and Florence + the Machine

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https://www.canva.com/design/DAFUlAVqSq0/QWMduCRBP1wlvdz6Q7QUsA/view?utm_content=DAFUlAVqSq0&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

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As the first 20th-century conceptual art movement, Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality, and intuition. Being wildly diverse, their output stretched from performance art to Dada poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage. The performance of Hugo Ball at Cabaret Voltaire marked the beginning of a new genre variously known as sound poems, poems without words, or abstract poems. To construct a Dada poem, the language should have been broken into syllables and individual letters, and then reconfigured as meaningless sounds. Breaking up and destroying language structures, their poetic formulation expunged language from its utilitarian purpose where word combinations turn into sonorous conjurations. By destroying everyday language, sound poems offered both a metaphor for the destruction caused by war and a commentary on the deceitfulness of language. A common feature of the dada soirée was the simultaneous poem, consisting of three or more participants speaking, singing, whistling, or bellowing different "poems" at the same time. In 1920, Tristan Tzara gave the following instruction on how To Make a Dadaist Poem:

Take a newspaper.Take some scissors.

Take some scissors.Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.

Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.Shake gently.

Shake gently.Next take out each cutting one after the other.

Next take out each cutting one after the other.Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.

Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.The poem will resemble you.

The poem will resemble you.

And there you are-an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Left: Hugo Ball at Cabaret Voltaire, Photograph by Marcel Janco, 1916, via fleurmach.com / Right: Proof sheet for the projected anthology Dadaco, edited by George Grosz, John Heartfield, et al., 1919, with Ball's 1917 text "Karawane"

Hugo Ball Introducing DADA Poems

On June 23, 1916, Hugo Ball appeared on stage of Cabaret Voltaire to perform a series of his new sound poems in the form of constructed sequences of unrecognizable sound-words. Wearing a costume of rigid, shiny blue cardboard cylinders, he was unable to walk and had to be carried onto the darkened stage. Standing like an obelisk, he began to read slowly and solemnly. Determined to maintain composure and seriousness throughout the performance, he began with the poem G adji beri bimba and then proceeded with Wolken (Labada's Song to the Clouds) and Karawane (Elephant Caravan).

Wolken (excerpt)

elomen elomen lefitalominal
wolminuscaio
baumbala bunga
acycam glastula feirofim flinsi

elominuscula pluplubasch
rallalalaio

endremin saxassa flumen flobollala
feilobasch falljada follidi
flumbasch

gluglamen gloglada gleroda glandridi

Karawane (excerpt)

ü üü ü
schampa wulla wussa olobo
hej tatta gorem
eschige zunbada
wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu
tumba ba-umf
kusa gauma
ba - umf

Poems didn't have any recognizable words, but the sound effects made when read aloud were carefully constructed to correspond to the subject-matter alluded to in their titles - rain from heavy clouds soaks the earth with "gluglamen gloglada gleroda glandridi" and the heavy "wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu" recreated a plodding rhythm of a caravan of elephants, while some commentators have pointed out that "elomen elomen lefitalominai" alludes to the Christ's cry from the cross. As Ball later recalled, after the lights went out as he had ordered, he "was carried down off the stage like a magical bishop".

Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters

An oddball even for a Dada, Kurt Schwitters composed Ursonate in 1922influenced by Raoul Hausmann's poem fmsbw. Forty minutes long and consisting of vocal utterance, vowels and consonants and words with no meaning, he performed it regularly, continuing to develop it and extend it for at least the next ten years. His own legendary recording of the piece was lost for years until it turned up in an attic in Holland in the late 1980s.

Translated as "the sonata in primordial sounds", it starts with the opening line: Fumms bö wö tää zää Uu, pögiff, kwii Ee. Endlessly repeating it in many different voices, Schwitters aimed to provoke audience who expected traditional prose. He hoped to encourage listeners to make connections between the sounds, creating their own meaning. Despite the fact that the poem sounds like a complete nonsense, it was in fact composed using a structure of a classical sonata consisting of four movements. Schwitters wrote a few pages of exacting specifications for reciting it, including correct pronunciation of the letters and brief prescriptions regarding tempo, pitch, dynamics, and emotional content.

DADA Poetry Generator

Being regarded as the early example of sound art, Dada poetry influenced many fellow artists who were not closely associated with the movement. This erratic poetry that celebrated the irrationality of language still continues to generate interest with artists and art enthusiasts. For those who are not that proficient in the traditional cut and paste technique, there are numerous Dada Poetry Generators online. Why not try to make your own Dada poem?

Editors' Tip: The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry by Willard Bohn

Willard Bohn's collection of Dada poetry is the most comprehensive ever compiled. Forty-two poets writing in seven different languages (French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and Dutch) are presented in a bilingual format, where appropriate, with the original text and its English translation on facing pages. The collection, which opens with a critical and historical introduction, spans the years from 1914 to 1923 and includes such poets as Walter Conrad Arensberg, André Breton, Malcolm Cowley, Max Ernst, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara. In trying to strip artistic expression down to its bare essentials, these writers often created works that were experiments in sound or typography. Twelve works by ten Dada visual artists (six of whom are also represented by their poetry) illustrate the book.
Featured image: Hugo Ball - Karawane, via thekollagekit.com

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Stumbling Across DADA Poetry | Widewalls

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As the first 20th-century conceptual art movement, Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality, and intuition. Being wildly diverse, their output stretched from performance art to Dada poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage.

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Cadáver exquisito, patrimonio poético del surrealismo

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El cadáver exquisito surgió hacia 1925 en manos de los artistas surrealistas, quienes buscaron crear algo que no sería posible imaginar por una sola mente.

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British Library source on Victorian Poets

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British Library source on Victorian Poets

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Victorian poetry From the rich imagery and rhythmic quality of Alfred Lord Tennyson to Christina Rossetti 's lyrical purity and powerful exploration of loss and faith, the Victorian period heralded a new wave of poetry that was influenced by its Romantic predecessors yet distinctly different.

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A helpful collection of resources for teachers. The "Understanding Literary History" page is a great all-in-one-place resource for comparing and connecting literary schools

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Welcome to the Teacher's Toolbox, a site designed to help pre-service educators prepare for their certification exams and future classrooms. The resources available here are reflective of these exams as well as of the knowledge and skills you'll someday share with your own students. If you have any questions about or suggestions for the content of this site, please email me (Dr. Allison Speicher; speichera@easternct.edu) or stop by my office (Webb 245) during office hours. If there's anything I can do to help you prepare for certification or your future as a teacher, please be in touch!

Happy studying!

Introduction to the Toolbox

Glossary of Literary Terms:Not sure how narrative poetry is different from lyric poetry? Can't tell the difference between an essay and an epistle? Learn these 90 key terms and never wonder again.

Understanding Literary History: Having trouble sorting out all the different periods, movements, and authors you've studied over the years at Eastern? These study sheets will help you to contextualize all that information.

Close Reading: A Refresher: Your professors ask to you perform close readings all the time, but when was the last time you actually thought about the steps a close reading entails? Complete this refresher course and close-read with confidence.

Critical Practices: We all read differently, and sometimes we even do it on purpose, by drawing on a variety of schools of literary theory. Not sure how a New Critical reading would look different from a psychoanalytic one? Read on.

Grammar Review:Your certification exams not only expect you to be able to identify proper and improper usage, but also to know the difference between a conjunction and a preposition, a compound sentence and a complex one. Feel your palms sweating already? Fear not, but start reviewing!

Modes of Writing: Soon, you'll be teaching your students to write all kinds of stuff, from persuasive essays to personal narratives to book reports. Your certification exams will ask you to identify differences between different modes of writing (narrative, expository, persuasive, etc.), so it might be time to brush up.

A Note for Students Seeking Elementary Certification

You can learn a lot more about the Reading and Language Arts subtest you'll have to pass to earn your teaching certification on the Praxis website. In addition to reviewing the ETS study materials carefully, you should study notes from your education classes, being sure you know things like the best practices for teaching ELL students and the stages of literacy development. You should also review notes from any English classes you've taken. Finally, I recommend reviewing the following sections of this website: Glossary of Literary Terms, Close Reading, Grammar Review, and Modes of Writing.

A Note for Students Seeking Secondary Certification

You can learn a lot more about the English Language Arts: Content and Analysis exam on the Praxis website. In addition to reviewing the ETS study materials carefully, you should study notes from your education classes, being sure you know things like the best practices for teaching ELL students, writing, and public speaking. You should also review notes from any English classes you've taken. Finally, I recommend reviewing the following sections of this website: Glossary of Literary Terms, Understanding Literary History, Close Reading, Critical Practices, Grammar Review, and Modes of Writing.

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Welcome to the Teacher's Toolbox, a site designed to help pre-service educators prepare for their certification exams and future classrooms. The resources available here are reflective of these exams as well as of the knowledge and skills you'll someday share with your own students.

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This preface might serve as a poetics statement for the earlier Romantics

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Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works

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How to Write A Sonnet | I wrote a poem about my cat!