<p><b>Week 6 of ModPo 2024 runs from Sunday October 6 at 9 AM through Sunday October 13 at 9 AM.</b>For those doing ModPo on their own or in small groups, the week 6 materials are open and available all year.</p><p>The so-called “New American Poetry” that emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s went in many directions; some trends, styles, and approaches overlapped, while some were (or seemed to be) more distinct and separable than others. The “Beat” poets were a fairly distinct community of writers, making it easier than it would be otherwise to study as a coherent movement their ecstatic, antic, apparently anti-poetic break with official verse culture. Our approach, in just one week, looks at two ubiquitously canonical Beats (Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac) and then quickly moves off to adjacent figures. Robert Creeley was not a Beat poet, but his most famous poem "I Know a Man" engages poetic, psychological, and social matters with which Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the others were obsessed. Bob Kaufman cherished the designation "beatnik," and certainly takes up issues of ecstatic living and social alienation in a way aligned with Ginsberg but his "Jail Poems" bespeak his embrace of multiple, simultaneous associations: imagist, itinerant, Black, Jewish, Zen surrealist, incarcerant, "abomunist." Anne Waldman is an “outrider” poet and is more closely associated with the second generation of “New York School” poets (see chapter 8), but she was a dear friend of Ginsberg and learned much from his political pedagogy. Amiri Baraka, as Leroi Jones, was a Beat poet for a few years and then broke away. The poem by Baraka that we study here gives us a chance to look back on Countee Cullen's traditionally formal poetic response to racist hatred. The prose-poem/manifesto by Baraka on how poets (should) sound extends a theme already important to this chapter: the primacy of sound (or music) as a form of freedom from linguistic convention. Jayne Cortez gives us a perfect example of this and permits us to suggest connections among the Beat aesthetic, Black Arts, the influences of jazz, and the emergence of “spoken word” performance. Our focus on Kerouac in chapter 7 is a little unusual — he, of course, is known more as a novelist than a poet. But his “babble flow” and riffing in "Old Angel Midnight" have been a significant influence on contemporary poets, more than his narrative fictional stance as psycho-social itinerant. We will have occasion, then, to examine and question Kerouac’s— and Ginsberg’s—claims to be writing naturally spontaneous language. Our chapter 9 poets for the most part doubt such a claim. </p><p><b>ASSIGNMENTS:</b> During this week there are two quizzes due (see below). There are no writing assignments due, nor peer reviews. There is a live webcast on Wednesday, October 9, at NOON (local Philadelphia time).</p>