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Le Médecin Malgré Lui by William Carlos Williams Oh I suppose I should Wash the walls of my office, Polish the rust from My instruments and keep them Definitely in order; Build shelves in the little laboratory; Empty out the old stains Clean the bottles And refill them; buy Another lens; put My journals on edge instead of Letting them lie flat In heaps—then begin Ten years back and Gradually Read them to date, Cataloguing important Articles for ready reference. In medical education, the use of a “third thing,” in the words of educator Parker Palmer, is thought to help students in reflective groups engage in conversation around sensitive and personal topics they may otherwise feel less comfortable talking about.3 The perspective offered by the poem, piece of music, or work of art—the third thing—represents “neither the voice of the facilitator nor the voice of a participant.” The title itself comes from a French comedic satire by Moliere,4 which features a character who pretends to be a doctor to escape death but finds that it is surprisingly easy to pretend to be a doctor, and decides to give up woodcutting, his original profession, to become a “doctor”. [...]the title already hints at the theme of performance and appearance—what does it mean to be a doctor in spite of himself? “I suppose I should” is a phrase that appears only twice in the poem, though it is understood that it can be attached to all of the actions that are contemplated.

Another response to the challenge of unfamiliarity is to coat the landscape's locations in anecdote. A run-of-the-mill word like \"cold\" can become poetically resonant if it is liberated from ambient superficiality, given the force of the unusual by being deployed in a way that makes it stand out. [...]when William Carlos Williams ruefully says that \"I have eaten/the plums/that were in/the icebox,\" and adds that \"they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold,\" he defamiliarizes that final word, giving it the monosyllabic shock value of being tactile, overpoweringly sensuous in its guilty delight.3 Place-names can be cold plums, too. Behan quotes, in full, the officious legalese in which the document is couched; in the most literal sense, the King's English is alienating, ejecting him as an unwanted alien. There they were, as if I'd never left them; in their sweet and stately order round the Bay—Bray Head, the Sugarloaf, the Two Rock, the Three Rock, Kippure, the king of them all, rising his threatening head behind and over their shoulders till they sloped down to the city.

In this essay, I propose a different approach to how we might conceptualize poetry, one that understands the poem not simply in terms of human-centered agency (that is, the complex of author-persona-reader) but as an emergent informatic-system. I focus on how the material and immaterial media of language, prosodic rules, and generic constraints all possess their own kinds of agency, comprising a set of limitations for what words the poet may select in composing the poem. Taking a poem by the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei, I build upon a number of theoretical framings to argue that these strictures function as the constitute the field of what is possible in terms of poetic composition, that the compositional loop between an individual poet and poem is a cybernetic system and the set of constraints that delimit what is compositionally possible is the cybernetic environment.

First Published in 2006.This is part of the literary critcism and cutlural theory collection.Situated within the larger narrative of the symbiosis between photography and modern poetry in America during the 1930s, each text examined by the author is a discrete object constituting a series of empirical statements, expressing certain empirical.

[...]in the best scientific tradition, we can hazard a hypothesis: that we will learn something about how scientific concepts-and especially the mind-bending strangeness of quantum physics-can inform the work of a contemporary poet, and, contrariwise, how contemporary poetry can perhaps prompt scientists to reflect on their models of reality and their knowledge of it, its underlying concepts and, dare I say it, its meanings and its metaphors. After the audience Q and A, we'll wind up, but I'll mention now that copies of Rae's most recent book Go Figure, as well other books of hers, will be available to buy in the foyer, and Rae will be staying around afterwards to sign copies. Rae Armantrout has published more than two dozen books, and among her many awards and prizes are the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 2009 collection Versed. Paul Hoover, in his note on Rae Armantrout in his anthology Postmodern American Poetry, writes, 'she has been associated with language poetry despite beingsuspicious of the term, which [and here he quotes one of Rae's essays] 'seems to imply division between language and experience, thought and feeling, inner and outer' [Armantrout, 'Why Don't Women' 31]' (Hoover 429).