Hi Poetics Fans! We’ve got some meter for you today.

Please join the PWG and Renaissance Colloquium for a work in progress discussion of Common Meter in Situ: (P/W “poetics” as always). Zoom link https://yale.zoom.us/s/99619568618. The event is open to the public.

The author adds:

“Thank you in advance, everyone, for spending some time reading and hopefully thinking with me. This will be the third chapter of my current book project, Common Meter: A Revised History of English Poetry, 1548-1948, which traces the use of common meter and its influence on post-medieval English prosody. To orient you briefly to that project: Chapter 1 is on the advent, evolution, and popularization of common meter in and through the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalms in English Meter; Chapter 2 looks at metrical revisions and corrections to printed poems in the 1550s, especially to Wyatt, showing editors and printers responding to the new metrical norm established by Sternhold and Hopkins; Chapter 4 focuses on the use of common meter in eighteenth century poetry; Chapter 5 treats its appearance in the fiction and poetry of Eliot and Hardy together with the reputation, proliferated by nineteenth century verse historians and editors, of common meter as “mere meter”; the last chapter turns to common meter in America, specifically its use in the Bay Psalm Book and in the poems of Emily Dickinson. The attached third chapter—truly a work in progress and a first draft, as becomes apparent toward the end—provides examples and analyses of common meter appearing in printed poetic collections and miscellanies; I also include some poems in two other psalm-related meters, long meter (cross-rhymed iambic tetrameter) and short meter (cross-rhymed quatrains with a 6.6.8.6 syllabic pattern), the other primary stanza forms in Sternhold and Hopkins. I have so far focused largely on George Gascoigne and George Herbert, but would like to include a fuller treatment of Isabella Whitney’s poems as well as, tentatively, a section on Katherine Philips. There is also a wealth of similar evidence from commonplace books and manuscript miscellanies, as well as from ballad broadsides, that I’ve collected but that might fall outside the bounds of the chapter. In addition to your overall thoughts, questions, insights, and hesitations, I’d be grateful to know what kinds of readings and theorization there’s an appetite for, and what you think the chapter could do without.”

Poster pdf: Lucia Martinez Valdivia

Hi Everyone!

We’re excited for our next event, a breezy tour of favorite marginalia, diacritics, scansions, and beyond — both literary and musical. If you have something to show off from your research, do let us know! We still have a spot or two free!

Here’s the zoom link

Please join the PWG, the Americanist Colloquium, and Anti-racist Pedagogy Reading Group this Thursday at 5pm for our much-anticipated discussion with Edgar Garcia (full bio and event information here: https://campuspress.yale.edu/poetics/2021/03/08/edgar-garcia-march-25th-5pm/

 

We encourage you to read read this interview with Edgar in the Chronicle, titled “Who Gets to Speak in Our Intellectual Traditions”:

https://www.chronicle.com/article/who-gets-to-speak-in-our-intellectual-traditions

 

Here is the zoom link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/99108542203

 

See you there!

Ben and Naomi

Another  much-anticipated event to announce — join us, the Americanist colloquium, and the Antiracist Pedagogy Group for a conversation with Edgar Garcia about literary intellectual traditions and their attendant pedagogical practices. March 25th, 5pm.  https://yale.zoom.us/j/99108542203

Edgar Garcia (PhD Yale English) is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas, primarily during the 20^th and 21^stcenturies. Winner of the 2018 Fence Modern Poets Series award, his collection of poems and anthropological essays on hemispheric migrations—Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (which also received an award from the Illinois Arts Council)—was published by Fence Books in 2019. His book of scholarship on the contemporary life of the sign-systems of the Americas—Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictographs, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu—was published by the University of Chicago Press in November 2019 (a selection of this work received honors from the Modern Language Association in 2020). He also co-edited an anthology on the transnational contexts of American literature, American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Columbia University Press, 2016). He regularly collaborates with visual artists. One such collaboration—with Eamon Ore-Giron, titled Infinite Regress—was published by Bom Dia Books in Berlin in February 2020. Currently, he is working on two books: one is a rethinking of risk and migration in humanistic frameworks (as opposed to statistical ones; an article-length portion of this project will appear in the November 2020 issue of Modern Philology); the other is a collection of essays on the K’iche’ Maya story of creation the Popol Vuh. Garcia is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

 

Edgar Garcia poster

The Poetics Working Group is excited to announce several upcoming events. Zoom links to follow.

 

April 2^nd, 3pm. (An)notation. An open roundtable with special musical guests Roger Mathew Grant (Wesleyan) and Anna Zayaruznaya (Yale). We invite all comers for a fast-paced tour of favorite markups of poetry / lyrics / measures. Scansions, marginalia, grace notes, orthographic quirks that testify to the dynamics of both composition and reading. If you’d like to share (5 minutes max) please write to ben.glaser@yale.edu + naomi.levine@yale.edu.

 

April 30^th, 12:30pm. The Poetics Working Group and Renaissance Colloquium welcome Lucía Martínez Valdivia (Reed College) for a discussion of a chapter in progress, “Common Meter in Situ,” from her book project “Common Meter: A Revised History of English Poetry, 1548–1928.” This chapter focuses on common meter and other psalmody-related forms in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century print and manuscript poetic collections. We will pre-circulate her chapter via list-serve and through our readings page.

 

We’re also rescheduling a planned March visit from Edgar Garcia (Chicago) to discuss his recent Signs of the Americas. Stay tuned!

Ben & Naomi

Please join us for our second meeting of the spring to discuss work in progress from Ardis Butterfield on the question of “song” in relation to lyric and lyric theory. On our readings page you will find a lecture as well as companion lyrics/songs for perusal. As this is unpublished work, please do not circulate. Friday 2/28 @ 2:30 in the English library LC319 — there will be snacks. All are welcome!

Ben, Naomi, and Lacey (contact ben.glaser@yale.edu with questions and for the readings page password)

Please join us on Friday Feb 14th, Valentines Day, at 3:00pm (Note: date and time change), to discuss a selection from Édouard Glissant’s The Poetics of Relation, presented by Lacey Jones. A pdf is available under “readings.” We will meet in LC318. Please email Naomi, Ben, or Lacey for more information or if you need the password.

Upcoming events:

Mark your calendars for Friday Feb 28th at 2:30, when Ardis Butterfield will speak on “Theory of Medieval Song,” a preview of her upcoming lecture series at Princeton.

In mid-April we’ll read a selection from the recent collection Communism and Poetry (Palgrave, 2019), presented by Lukas Moe and Tim Kreiner.

We also encourage graduate students to get in touch if they would like to workshop essays, chapters, or talks in progress. We aim for a date in early-April. Work at any stage is welcome, as are new attendees.

Ben, Naomi, and Lacey

Please join us at 1pm on Friday October 11^th for a discussion of, and with, Meredith McGill (Beinecke Library Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities, 2019-2020; Professor of English, Rutgers). We will meet in LC (Linsly-Chittenden) 319.

We’ll be focusing on a recent essay about the idea of the “ballad” – an important term for recent work in poetics. Meredith has offered two other pieces: a short essay on the concept of “format” in early American studies, and another on reinterpretations of Frances E. Watkins Harper. She suggests, as background reading for her theory of format, the intro to Jonathan Sterne’s 2012 MP3: The Meaning of a Format. These latter pieces are a bonus, but people should not feel an expectation of covering all the reading! Meredith will be showing us some of her archival research as well.

Light lunch will be provided: please RSVP to naomi.levine@yale.edu so we know how much food to get. Readings are all available under “Readings and Resources.”

On Friday, Sept. 27th at 3pm, in Linsly-Chittenden (LC) 212, we’ll be discussing two recent articles on form/formalism:

Gaskill, Nicholas. “The Close and the Concrete: Aesthetic Formalism in Context.” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, vol. 47, no. 4, 2016, pp. 505–524.

Lehman, Robert S. “Formalism, Mere Form, and Judgment.” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, vol. 48, no. 2, 2017, pp. 245–263.

Snacks will be served. If you have magical free time, we recommend some background reading for our Fall focus on poetics and formalism. Look under our “Readings” page for everything.

 

Kramnick, Jonathan, and Nersessian, Anahid. “Form and Explanation.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 43, no. 3, 2017, pp. 650–669

Two essays from the English Institute 2013: Form (pub. ELH 2015, Summer)

Butterfield, Ardis. “Why Medieval Lyric?” ELH, vol. 82, no. 2, 2015, pp. 319–343

Macpherson, Sandra. “A Little Formalism.” ELH, vol. 82, no. 2, 2015, pp. 385–405.

The second spring meeting of the PWG will be Friday, April 6^th, 4:00pm in Whitney Humanities Center B-04. Tim Kreiner will lead a discussion of “Lyric and the Service Sector: Frank O’Hara at Work,” the first chapter from Jasper Bernes’ recent book The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. For those with time who are inclined to see the full sweep of Bernes’ historical method, the introduction is available as optional reading. For those who are curious about Bernes’ method but have less time, the last pages of the introduction (p. 21ff of the pdf; p. 32ff of the book) offer a schematic overview.

 

As always, we will have snacks and drinks and sharp discussion. If you would like to know more about the group, or need the password for the readings page, please be in touch with any of the organizers.

 

Ben, Naomi, and Clay