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THE VERY SHORT POEM
JESSE NATHAN
Course Description: This course examines the Very Short Poem,
which, for the purposes of our study, will be defined as any
verse of ten or fewer lines. Or should we say 8? The aim, at any
rate, will be to understand these tiny lyric poems not as part
of a minor mode, but as singular achievements answering various
socio-formal cultural needs, revealing of writers and their
times something that’s otherwise often inaccessible. What is
this something?
Students will be exposed to key concepts in the field of
poetics, but they will apply these ideas specifically to the
study of brevity in poetry. Throughout the quarter, we will work
on answers to a number of questions: What is lyric poetry? Is
the short poem at the center of poetry itself, a form residing
at the heart of lyricism, or is it something different
altogether? What makes a short work particularly memorable and
enjoyable? Can briefness be a form of expansiveness? What are
the effects of concision—on meaning, on readers, or on poets?
What is restrictive about the brief mode? What are the freedoms
and challenges of it, and how does translation complicate the
power of pithiness? What distinguishes short fragments (à la
Sappho) from realized short verses? Has the history of poetry
led us toward, or away from, the short poem? What might this say
about our attention spans, and the future (or past) of reading?
Students will become familiar with exceptionally brief works by
dozens of poets, from Chaucer to Robert Hass, from Robert
Herrick to Rae Armantrout. We’ll also cut across geographic,
national, and generic boundaries: Students will, for instance,
examine haiku, and maybe also the aphoristic works of Nietzsche,
Rilke’s unpublished shorts, or the (possible) poetry of Twitter
and text messaging.
Textbooks:
1) The Oxford Book of Short Poems, P. J. Kavanagh and James
Michie, eds. (1985)
2) Very Short Poems, a course packet assembled by instructor
3) Aram Saroyan, The Complete Minimal Poems (2007)
4) The Essential Haiku, Robert Hass, ed. (1995)
Main Assignments:
1) Paper #1: The History. A 4-page paper detailing and
fleshing out the historical context of a particular short
poem, utilizing at least 2 secondary sources.
2) Paper #2: The Form. A 4-page paper detailing and fleshing
out the form—how it works and why, and for whom—of a second
particular short poem, utilizing at least 2 secondary
sources.
3) Paper #3: Final research paper and presentation, featuring
thorough consideration of 3-4 additional short poems, and
utilizing at least 4 secondary sources. 8-10 pages.
4) Recitation: At some point in the quarter each student will
memorize a very short poem, say it for the class, and say
something brief about why he or she chose it.
A Few Goals:
Skill-based:
1) The course will develop students’ close reading skills by
focusing on very short texts, by zeroing in on these
“droplets of language” with intensity and method.
2) The course will demystify the process of producing literary
criticism by helping students in each stage of the making:
research, planning, composition, revision.
Content-based:
3) The course will foster a critical understanding of various
short poetic modes writers have deployed, the formal
choices they’ve made or resisted, the meanings these forms
evince.
4) The course will provide a sidelong introduction to the
lyric, something of its history or essence, particularly in
English literature.
Calendar:
Weeks 1-3:
We’ll work through The Oxford Book of Short Poems and the course
packet, looking at early examples of the form. We’ll work also
out of Robert Hass’s haiku anthology, as well as early religious
texts like the Judeo-Christian Book of Proverbs, to develop an
historical understanding of the international origins of very
short poetry.
We’ll attempt to define the genres within the genre; to define
what a very short poem does, or tries to do, and how; to
distinguish it from other poetic forms and fragments; to create
taxonomies of the very short verse, distinguishing among styles
and formal commitments. What strategies do we need to develop to
read very short poetry well and critically, and how do these
methods differ from other reading practices, if they do?
Paper #1 due by the end of week 3: A 4-page paper detailing and
fleshing out the historical context of a particular short poem.
What, for instance, is the socio-cultural history of a
particular English epigram? Or: Looking closely at one example,
what historical factors might have fostered Yamazaki Sokan’s
“vulgar” haiku poems?
Weeks 4-6:
We’ll continue working through The Oxford Book of Short Poems
and the course packet, turning to 19th- and early 20th-century
examples of the form. How do English poets view the short poem
in the 19th century? Is a very short lyric a “bad” poem, and if
so, when is it not? How do these ideas develop or change in the
20th-century, particularly in relation to Modernist practice?
Possibly at this point we’ll look at related formal developments
in other literary and philosophical traditions, such as
Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorisms, or Rilke’s fragmentary
unpublished shorts, or Raymond Queneau’s genre-defying flash
prose poems.
Paper #2 due by the end of week 6: A 4-page paper detailing and
fleshing out the form itself—how it works and why, and for whom—
of a particular short poem. For example: read closely a specific
poem, like Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” or H.D.’s “Sea
Violet,” and elucidate how the very short form might be
particularly suited to a Modernist sense of poetic structure and
function.
Also! We’ll begin development of the final paper. In-class
discussions will cover brainstorming techniques, creating a
clearly defined research question, and setting reachable
research and writing goals. Considerable attention will be
devoted to the study of model papers of similar length and
subject matter.
Weeks 7-9:
We’ll continue working through The Oxford Book of Short Poems
and the course packet, turning to late 20th-century and early
21st-century short forms. Will read Saroyan’s minimalist poetry,
and also possibly explore Twitter and text messaging as poetic
forms (consider, for instance, actual twitter feeds or Paul
Muldoon’s 2006 series of “text message” poems).
We’ll discuss contemporary attention spans and the state of
reading, perhaps in relation to “the Google problem” (as
discussed in The Atlantic, and elsewhere) and what place poems
hold in this situation. We’ll also hope to have extensive
discussion regarding strategies for researching and writing an
academic paper.
Completion of 8-10 page paper, and presentation of student
research, weeks 9-10.