Loiu

transcript of audio introduction to week 1

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Hi, this is Al and I'm going to introduce chapter one, week one. First week, we'll be talking about the poems (some poems) by Emily Dickinson and mainly Song of Myself (many sections of Song of Myself) by Walt Whitman. And the second week, as you already know, we'll be considering some more contemporary,more modern and contemporary Dickinsonians (people writing in the Dickinsonian tradition whatever that is) and several people, key people, in the Whitmanian line - William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg just as examples.

At the end of each week for the first two weeks - each week of chapter one, that is - there'll be a video recording you'll see that consists of a discussion about preferences for Whitman or Dickinson. This is just a chance to air out the distinctions and differences between those two poets. It's a silly binarism and there's no need to choose one over the other, obviously, but we find that it's useful - when looking at proto-modernism, these two remarkable and in their own way radical poets - useful to think of them as distinct enough to state preferences for one or the other. Whitman an extensive poet, Dickinson an intensive poet; Whitman a poet of long lines and Dickinson a poet of succinct, short, pithy, torqued aphorisms as lines; Dickinson mostly using the ballad form, Whitman using free verse, etc. These are distinctions and after the first week you'll see us talk about the differences between the two and and the only point of that is to invite you to participate in a discussion about these two proto-modernists using the discussion forum to continue that debate.

While I'm on the topic of the discussion forums, this is where most of the action will take place in ModPo and I hope you'll go to it maybe right now while you're listening to this, you'll click to the discussion forums and you'll see that currently they are set up, a series of sub forums are set up, these are the major