READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS FOR TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2006

Please read Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara, and as much of David Lehman's The Evening Star as you can get through.

Please also read/print out the following articles, which are available as Full-Text Articles from WilsonSelectPlus in the USD Library Research Databases. To access WilsonSelectPlus, click HERE to get to the USD Library Research Databases page. Next, click on Arts and Humanities. On the next screen, click on Language and Literature. On the screen after that, click on Arts and Humanities Search. You'll be taken to a screen next that has a drop-down menu for databases to search, at which point you'll want to replace AH Search with WilsonSelectPlus on the drop-down menu. Now you can simply type in article or author titles to pull up the full-text articles from the WilsonSelectPlus database. (Please note that at some point during this process you'll most likely be prompted for your USD User ID and Password).

"'And Everyone and I Stopped Breathing': William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara and the News of the Day in Verse," by Paul R. Cappucci, Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Fall 2003), p. 375-89.

"Tribes of New York: Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, and the Poetics of the Five Spot," by Michael Magee, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 694-726.

Please also read/print out the following articles, which are available as Full-Text Articles from Project Muse in the USD Library Research Databases. To access Project Muse, click HERE to get to the USD Library Research Databases page. Next, click on Arts and Humanities. On the next screen, click on Language and Literature. On the screen after that, scroll down and click on Project Muse. Now you can simply type in article or author titles to pull up the full-text articles from the Project Muse database. (Please note that at some point during this process you'll most likely be prompted for your USD User ID and Password).

"Angel Hair Magazine, the Second-Generation New York School, and the Poetics of Sociability," by David Kane, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 45, No. 2 (2004), pp. 331-367.

"Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg," by Anne Hartman, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer 2005), pp. 40-56.

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Here are some discussion questions for this week's readings:

1. In what ways do Frank O'Hara's "personism" and David Lehman's news-of-the-day journal poems relate to Confessional poetry? In what ways do they seem radically different from the Confessional poems we've looked at thus far?

2. Critics have spent a lot of time criticizing an alleged lack of style, craft, and technique in the work of the Confessional poets. How do O'Hara and Lehman hold up to similar scrutiny, and in what ways might you defend (or not) their use (or lack) of poetic style, craft, and technique?

3. In what ways do painters and paintings emerge as a significant aesthetic influence in Frank O'Hara's poems?

4. Based on our previous discussions of Modernism and Post-Modernism, would you categorize O'Hara's poetry as one or the other, or somewhere in between, and why? How about David Lehman? Is he a Post-Modern poet?

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Finally, here is the memoir prompt from The Autobiography Box for this week:

Write about the first time you went away from home alone. Was it a vacation? Was it for work? Were you looking for something? Were you running away? Do you see that excursion as a "hero's journey", or did you go kicking and screaming? How did it change you?