"70 Days of Poetry
Some days ago, the literary course "Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo)" by Al Filreis started. The official introduction to it says: "This course is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, from Dickinson and Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly "difficult." - Almost 30.000 people enrolled so far, .. and i look forward to it, and am curious how a poetry class of that size might work..."
that's what i wrote on 16th September, after the first week of the poetry class. so glad i arrived at the course when it started, and can only say: it was a great, inspiring, and moving experience.
the end of (Mod)poetry
this week was the final week, and today, while listening to the final video discussion, i layed out all the syllabus and note and poetry pages that i printed out during those 10 weeks, starting at the very first poem from weeek 1: Emily Dickinson's "I dwell in Possiblity", moving to Walt Whitman "Song of Myself", William Carlos Williams "Smell!", Allen Ginsberg "A Supermarket in California"...,
... to the week that was dedicated to Imagism, and the week of Gertrude Stein,
... to the week of Antimodernist Doubts and Formalism,
... and of course to the Beat week with Ginsberg, Kerouac, Creeley and Waldman
... to the New York School, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara,
... and finally to the trends in recent poetry again, with the Language Poets, the week of Chance, and with the ending point: Conceptualism.
what a poetic journey.
it leaves me with a bit of a post-journey blues, the classes, the poetry, the readings, and Al Filreis and the whole discussion group, the structured and guided pathway they carved for all to explore, the Kelly Writers House itself, that all has turned into a part of these last 70 days. now that time ends.
goodbye and thank you, Modpo :)
i will miss you.
**
and some extra links, for poetic visits and revisits:
- poetry links: 57 episodes of PoemTalk + extra links
- the modpo course page, which will remain archived for a while
- the Modpo blog posts in this blog
- a poem created by taking a single line from each poem in ModP: modpoem
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