Waking at 3am on Saturday and finding myself unable to get back to sleep, I came downstairs in my pyjamas, made a cup of tea and plugged into the final readings for Week 3 of ModPo.  I love this course!

Hilda Doolittle (known as H.D.), Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams were the poets we ModPo students studied last week.  In addition, via video links, we viewed two pieces of visual art by Marcel Duchamp and watched Al Filreis and his team discussing their significance in relation to the Imagist and Modernist movements.

A discussion I particularly enjoyed was about Williams’ 1923 poem The Red Wheelbarrow (see below) and Duchamp’s  1917 ‘sculpture’ Fountain.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Professor Filreis asked “What do you say to the doubters, sceptics and grumps” who question the artistic value of these pieces, in a way that they would never question, for example,  Hamlet or The Charge of the Light Brigade or more traditional visual art.  This scepticism, Filreis continued, is at the nub of Modernism.  Duchamp and Williams, in privileging everyday objects by exhibiting them, or making them the subject of a poem, provoke debate, grumpy or otherwise,  in the reader or gallery visitor.   We engage self-consciously and questioningly with the text or the exhibit, rather than passively observing them, evidencing the Manifesto of Modernism to “Make it New”.

Almost one hundred years later, the debate continues, the scepticism remains, as anyone who’s ever heard “But how can it be a poem if it doesn’t rhyme/have regular stanzas/use iambic pentameter?” knows too well.  Full of such thoughts, as well as two cups of tea, still in my pyjamas, the clock approaching 7am, my husband heading out for his run, my teenage children still asleep, I felt some of the excitement I’d experienced reading Emily Dickinson’s I Dwell in Possibility; ModPo is a wonderful reminder of the potential of poetry.

This week: Gertrude Stein.