Readings From Selected Works

James Longenbach is a poet, critic, and the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester, where he teaches courses on American poetry, British and American modernism, James Joyce, Shakespeare, and creative writing. His critical works include Modernist Poetics of History, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism, Wallace Stevens: the Plain Sense of Things, and his most recent The Art of the Poetic Line, which explores the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. He is the author of the poetry collections Threshold, Fleet River, Draft of a Letter, and his most recent, The Iron Key: Poems, a meditation on the conditions and consequences of beauty. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Poetry series, among other national journals and magazines

How I Teach: James Longenbach

James Longenbach is a member of the Department of Englis

Accidental modernism : spontaneity and design in modern American poetry

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of English, 2010.This dissertation explores the role of “accident”—a moment that appears to flout intention, that seems to defy expectation and cause—in American literary modernism. In particular, it examines the ways in which notions of contingency were crucial for modernism’s formulation of both personal identity and poetic form, two concepts we normally consider to be mobilized precisely in opposition to chance or accident. Current critical narratives often present a dividing line between the perceived rigors of modernist form and the vicissitudes of postmodern “accidental” verse, a model in which a formally preoccupied modernism expiates the accident while a postmodern “culture of spontaneity” recuperates it. This study contends that modernism had already created a poetic in which form was not formula, or prescribed pattern, but the modulation—the satisfaction and frustration—of expectation itself. For modernism, this dissertation argues, form encodes—and needs—its own accidents, its own seemingly wayward swerves. As the introduction outlines, the advent of the automobile in the teens and twenties drastically increased the number of accidents in American life, transforming accidents from aberrations—interruptions of identity—to the very stuff out of which identity might be fashioned. Selves and accidents were no longer inimical to each other but deeply reticulated, as the self no longer seemed at the helm of its own experience. Amidst this emerging discourse of accident, modern poets developed an aesthetic in which the shock of the unexpected helped to formulate both a poem and the fragile lyric self that seemed to stand behind it. Marianne Moore, with her at once chaotic and rigid verse in Observations (1924), explored the paradox that the arbitrary can come to feel controlling while formal discipline can seem liberating. William Carlos Williams used the apparent openness of spontaneous writing in Kora in Hell (1920) ironically to tighten his prosody in Spring and All (1923), creating poems in which the spontaneous gesture only seems to exist against a backdrop of immense sonic and syntactic control. George Oppen, in “Route” (1969), a poem largely about a terrible car accident Oppen was involved in as a young man, produced a sliding syntax in which sense-making connections are always contingent and provisional, a prosody based in crucial ways on shock itself. Frank O’Hara, in Lunch Poems (1964), created a poetry whose swift but highly deliberate structural shifts appear to happen as if by accident. Ultimately, each poet presented an aesthetic in which so-called “open” form poetics can be just as delimited and limiting as traditional, “closed” form poetics—an aesthetic in which accidents were less strategic ploys than always a part of the form they seemed to destroy