ModPo update: 1) weeks 7 & 8; 2) PennSound; 3) audio intro to LangPo; 4) O’Hara essay; 5) Kelly Writers House
Today is our final day working together to read and discuss the poems of the New York School—week 7. Week 8 begins tomorrow.
Of course if you only had a chance to read a few of the New York School poems, and watched just a few of the videos that accompany each poem, you can go back and finish the poems and videos any time during the year. And please do! ModPo, as you know, is always open. Meantime, do a few more week 7 things today and move ahead with the rest of us to week 8 (Language poets) starting tomorrow!
We have set up a “text-audio alignment” page for several poems in ModPo. One of them is John Ashbery’s “Some Trees,” which has become an anthemic work for the course. If you go HERE you can read the poem while hearing Ashbery perform it. (The text-audio alignments have been created in a partnership with PennSound, the world’s largest archive of recordings of poets reading their poems.)
If you want to look ahead to week 8 today, I suggest that you begin with my audio introduction. When recording this intro I got carried away. I had too much to say! So we’ve divided my introduction to the Language poets into three parts, as follows:
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Part 1: overview of all 3 weeks of chapter 9: LINK TO AUDIO (9 mins.)
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Part 2: overview of chapter 9.1/week 8: LINK TO AUDIO (11 mins.)
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Part 3: 16 tenets or principles of Language writing: LINK TO AUDIO (51 mins.)
Next week’s live webcast will come to you from New York City, as I’ve previously mentioned. It will begin at 6 PM on Wednesday, October 30th. Please mark your calendars and plan to join us from wherever you are. If you will be in or near New York, join us in person; RSVP by writing to modpo@writing.upenn.edu.
If you are thinking of writing an essay on O’Hara, in response to assignment #3, please write and post it today or tomorrow so that you will receive our responses and comments and reviews next week. The poem people are writing about is “Personal Poem.” The text is below.
Did you know that EVERY program and event that takes place at the Kelly Writers House—not just poetry readings, but events featuring fiction writers, playwrights, screenwriters, musicians, journalists, podcasters, visual arts, makers of comix, people in the world of arts business, et alia—is video-streamed live. The link to the KWH video stream is HERE. The link to the KWH events calendar is HERE. If you wish to receive one weekly email with a schedule of the next week’s events, send a message to wh@writing.upenn.edu.
Every ModPo person has an open invitation to visit us at the Writers House (3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia PA 19143) any time.
Planning (here in Manhattan today) to walk around at lunchtime,
—Al
*
Personal Poem
by Frank O’Hara
Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now I’m happy for a time and interested
I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I’d like to have a silver hat please
and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five years my batting average
is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it’s
cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich
and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so
