24501/24502
Spring, 2006
Professor Gage
Office: Founders Hall 218;
Office Hours: F 218, Wednesdays 1:30-3 and by appointment
Class: Wednesday, 6-7:30 in Founders 236
Please enter the Moogle Chat Room for discussion for poetry following each class session.
Professor Gage's e-mail gaget@northcoast.com
Web Page www.humboldt.edu/~teg1/syllabus/485/485_syllabus.s00.html
This WebSite is dedicated to poet and mentor Robert Beloof.
Required Text: Dylan Thomas Collected Poems
Gignomai (Italics), the Nature of Poetry/Nature Poetry. Emphasizing orality in poetry, the colloquium will respond retrospectively to lyrics, ballads and persona poems by Thomas, Miles, Graham, Keats, Roethke, Shakespeare, Frost, and e. e. cummings. The title of the course plays upon the ambiguity of "gnosis," or "knowing," revealed in the Greek verb "gignomai." "gignomai" is the middle voice of the verb. A poem happens, it magikes into existence, like images taking form in photographic chemicals.
Gignomai embodies what we will encounter in the colloquium this semester: that poetry, unlike narrative, is a Happening, a process of becoming. The course will be different from others in that students will not prepare by reading the selected poems for the scheduled class, but rather they will engage via E-mail after the class by retrospectively discoursing upon what they are understanding of the work.
Grades: Grading in colloquiums are credit/no credit. Attendance is crucial to receive credit. Each student will have an option either to memorize some work from either of the two texts or to maintain a journal in which a record of initial and summative responses are documented.
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Below are video lectures in situ in two series. The first is a discussion of the course title, gignomai, as it is realized in Euripides' drama The Baaches. The second, third, and fourth, also from Sicily, situates you in Greek temples that explore the relationship of temenos and surroundings to eternal themes. "The Pharmakon" designates how modern practices and the drug culture echo cultic continuity.
The next series of four deal with how Islamic architecture embodies the Ptolemaic vision of the Universe. The first three were filmed in southern Spain; the last in Istanbul, Turkey.
Optional video lectures on Setting, Seasons, and Continuity in cults, ritual, and rhetoric
Space/Time: From pre-literacy poems sung the wonders of the world. Two planes, space and time, consume humankind's mythopoetic and religious imaginations.
These two discussion are set where Pindar, the 5th BCE poet, delivered his ode. The ritual of drama links heavens,terrain, and subterrain.
1. "To Know/To Be: Euripdes and the Baachae" - Streaming Media
2. "Xenos, Pindar: a Guest in Syracusa." - Streaming Media
3. "The Sanctuary below the Theater of Dionysus" - Streaming Media
4. "Seasons and Drama" - Streaming Media
5. "Temples and Environment" - Streaming Media
6. "The Pharmakon: the Continuity of Cult" - Streaming Media
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Optional video lectures on architecture, religion, and poetry.
The this series of five deal with how Islamic architecture embodies the Ptolemaic vision of the Universe.
1. At the Alhambra in Spain, architecture speak a language. The seven heavens in Carmares Dome anticipates Dante's Paradise. The ceiling of the Comares Hall adumbrates the ptolemaic heavens, the same seven heavens common in Dante and in Islam. Here is a replication of the same hall's ceiling, in which you may see the concentric circles of stars, representing the various heavens.
Most principles flowed westward to become appropriated by the West, e.g. Founders Hall at HSU. Some innovation never reached the west, such as Ayyubic stalactite feature within the octogon of a dome or the indented portal.
Hall of Abeneirages, or "Heaven brought to Earth").
2. At Cordoba, the Mesquitas Mosque centered the Khalifat of the Omayyad Dynasty. Two angles of the ceiling: the Mihrab ceiling and the Mihrab of the Mesquitas. A prayer rug can outline the same pattern The "qibla";and mihrab or gate of paradise.
3.Rumi from Turkey is the Shakespeare of Islam, the poet of Divine Love.
4. The economy of spices, the treasure sought by the West, parallels the axial referents observed above from the ancient Greek culture. This Istanbul market shaped the history.
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Wednesday, January 18: gignomai: AporiImage/Sound
Linked to the underlined words are images in scripts that convey beyond design a signified evocation, an immediate experience to those who negotiate each script. The Chinese conveys an abbreviation of the referent in reality. For example, in the sentence "Chutney, my dog, became president" both the subject and the noun following the verb refer to the same phenomena in reality. That's metonymy. In Arabic, like English, the grapheme does not immediately abbreviate reality. The grapheme is an arbitrary symbol. Like metaphor, there is a mental step between the image and what the reader makes meaningful. For example, in the sentence "Richard has a lion's heart" the subject and object refer to two different things in reality and the reader conflats the two into a third.
Please have read the article by Fenollosa, attached.
"Ghasal" in Urdo in Arabic script
In this video you will see an Islamic caligrapher, concentrating on composing an Arabic word above. Note how linear and engaged he is drafting on paper the sacred black ink.
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Wednesday, January 25: Nature
As Emerson explains in "The Poet", poets are like antennae for the species; they celebrate the rhythms of the seasons, or what the ancients called the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage of heaven and earth.
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Wednesday, February 2: Nature
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Wednesday, February 8:Portraits and Personae
Bakhtine teaches us about the unfinalizibility of utterance. A poetic utterance is overheard, not heard, according to John Stuart Mill. Likewise human intercourse is made up of negotiations involving codes other than language. Spices are a dietary code that explains much of human history. One of tonight's subject will be Dan Masterson's poem "Fist Fighter". This contemporary poet captures in his work "the Happening"” embodied in Bellows' painting Sharkey's. I may E-mail you one of Dan's latest, a poem inspired by a painting by Picasso.
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Wednesday, February 15:Voices
A Greek mask, a persona, revealed tragedy or comedy. The audience would realize from the lines uttered behind the mask the setting, the personality and the character's relationship to the unraveling plot. Likewise, the Greek temple, which one sees at ground level, relates more profoundly along a vertical axis linking the subterranean and heavenly topoi, with a sanctuary often immediately below the temple to host of gods above. The theater was such a temple. Here at Syracusa, Sicily, you will hear an ode by Pindar in the first movie and then enter the sanctuary beneath for the second discussion."Xenos, Pindar: a Guest in Syracusa."
"Pindar's Nemean Ode I" - Streaming Media
"The Sanctuary below the Theater of Dionysus" - Streaming Media
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Wednesday, February 22: Voices
A reenactment of marching Janissaries entering the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. These warriors, originally the sultanęs cooks, became an army of Platonic Guardians that battled for the Ottoman Empire until the 19th Century when their power so threatened the Sultan that he crushed them and disbanded the corps.
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Wednesday, March 1: Dialogics
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Wednesday, March 8: Wednesday Final: Each student, who wishes, will recite a poem and hand in a statement explaining why they took this particular poem to heart. Those who have not recited in class will write out what they memorized and provide a statement of why this choice was meaningful.
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