ModPo is a FREE (no fee, no charge) fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly "difficult." We encounter and discuss the poems one at a time. It's much easier than it seems! Join us and try it!
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ModPo is open all year, so you can enroll now, or any time, and join us. Each year we host a lively, interactive 10-week session, in which we move together through the ten-week syllabus. The next live 10-week session of ModPo will begin on September 4, 2021, and will conclude on November 15, 2021. Al Filreis will be in touch with you by email before the September 4 start of the course with all the information you'll need to participate.
During the 10 weeks of the course, you will be guided through poems, video discussions of each poem, and community discussions of each poem. And (unique among open online courses) we offer weekly, interactive live webcasts. Our famed TAs also offer office hours throughout the week. We help arrange meet-ups and in-site study groups.
If you are curious about the ModPo team, type "ModPo YouTube introduction" into Google or your favorite search engine, and watch the 20-minute introductory video. You will get an overview of the course and will meet the brilliant TAs, who will be encountering the poems with you all the way to the end.
Syllabus
WEEK 1
chapter 1.1 (week 1)—Whitman & Dickinson, two proto-modernists
Week 1 of ModPo 2022 runs from Sunday, September 4 at 9 AM through Sunday, September 11 at 9 AM. For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 1 materials are open and available all year.
In this first week of our course, we'll encounter two 19th-century American poets whose quite different approaches to verse similarly challenged the official verse culture of the time. As a matter of form (but also of content), Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were radicals. What sort of radicalism is this? In a way, this course is all about exploring expressions of that radicalism from Whitman and Dickinson to the present day. Such challenges to official verse culture (and often U.S. culture at large) present us with a lineage of ideas about art and expression, a tradition that can be outlined, mostly followed, somewhat traced. In this course, we follow, to the best of our ability — and given the limits of time — that tradition and try to make overall sense of it. We will read Divya Victor's "W Is for Walt Whitman's Soul" toward the end of week 1 in anticipation of other later responses to Whitman and Dickinson encountered in week 2.
You will find that we do this one poem at a time. Here in week 1, we will explore Dickinson first, Whitman second, and then begin to sketch out the major differences between them, which, some say, amount to two opposite ends of the spectrum of poetic experimentalism and dissent in the nineteenth century. Which is to say: on the spectrum of traditional-to-experimental poetry, these two poets are on the same end (experimental); on the spectrum of experimentalism, their approaches can put them on opposite ends. In short, they offer us alternative poetic radicalisms, and their influences down the line (which we will explore in week 2) are both powerful but are also largely distinct. One question you'll be prepared to ask by the end of the course: Is the Dickinsonian or the Whitmanian tradition more ascendant and apt in today's experimental poetry?
ASSIGNMENTS: During this week, there are two quizzes due (see below); there are no writing assignments or peer reviews due. There is a live webcast on Wednesday, September 7, 2022, at 3PM (Philadelphia time).
