Natalie Gerber | SUNY Fredonia (original) (raw)
Papers by Natalie Gerber
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 8, 2019
Modernist American poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams insisted on t... more Modernist American poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams insisted on the values of linguistic sound beyond the semantic. Stevens focused on the modulations of the sounds and lexical stresses of individual words within the meter. Frost and Williams focused on the less predictable intonational contours of phrases and sentences (although for Frost, the intonational contours play with and against the metrical pattern, whereas for Williams, lines tend to align with intonational phrases, turning prosodic speech tunes into a prosodic verse measure). Drawing on recent cognitive studies that pertain to the processing of speech sound and birdsong, this article suggests a need to revise critical assessments of the poets’ investments of belief in sound; it also considers why, given this research, Frost’s theory of sentence sounds has, perhaps unfairly, fared a worse critical reception.
The Wallace Stevens Journal, 2014
The Wallace Stevens Journal, 2013
Choice Reviews Online, 2001
... [The techniques of temporal arrangement represent an admit-tedly difficult, but rewarding fie... more ... [The techniques of temporal arrangement represent an admit-tedly difficult, but rewarding field for the investigation of works of art.]. Wolfgang Kayser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk In HISTORICAL TERMS, SEQUENTIAL DYNAMICS BELONG TO THE GENERAL category of ...
Wallace Stevens Journal, 2017
Wallace Stevens Journal, 2011
HE PROSODY of Wallace Stevens has long intrigued scholars. Unlike many of his contemporaries who ... more HE PROSODY of Wallace Stevens has long intrigued scholars. Unlike many of his contemporaries who famously composed their poetry entirely in meter (Robert Frost and E. A. Robinson), or vehemently eschewed rhyme and meter in favor of free verse (William Carlos Williams), or elected some alternate form of measure (Marianne Moore), or alternated periods of both practices (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), Stevens conveys his receptivity to what he terms both measure and free verse, provided each has any "aesthetic impulse back of it" (Letter to Ferdinand Reyher, 13 May 1921). He also frequently wrote both metrical and free-verse poems throughout his career. At times, the form of the one comments upon the other. Yet, as frequently, the two forms function more simply as different modes suited to different purposes. In his late verse, whose metricality has been questioned, we see a quasi-blank verse that is described as a nearly "free-verse line" and one that has elicited interest but not, to my knowledge, a theoretical description. In this article, I will propose one way in which Stevens' experiments with the two verse practices merge together and one way in which his late blank-verse line might serve as an unlikely bridge to what we think of as conventional free-verse lines. Before coming to the late blank verse, though, I want to look back to Stevens' earliest expressive positioning of iambic pentameter verse as a vehicle for poetry.
Wallace Stevens Journal, 2014
William Carlos Williams Review, 2009
Resources for American Literary Study, 2011
Perhaps because William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) did not explicitly assign himself the task of... more Perhaps because William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) did not explicitly assign himself the task of writing essays to explicate, advance, and defen his poetics (as he writes in the preface to his Selected Essay, he composed "prose pieces... from time to time, more or less at random, sometimes on the spur of the moment" [v]), his correspondence has continued to be of especially great interest to literary scholars. It is in individual letter found in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams that Williams most explicitly lays out some of his theories of versification, as it is in the letters of The American Idiom that Williams explores what he calls "the bedrock the mother tongue of Brooklyn, USA" (William and Norse 47). This new volume of letters to his younger brother, Edgar Irving Williams (1884-1974), not all of which were unknown before, as the thoughtful and careful editor, Andrew J. Krivak, reminds us, covers Williams's early years, from his studies at the University of Pennsylvania to the establishment o his medical practice in Rutherford, New Jersey, and promises significantl to enrich critical scholarship on early Williams in several respects. Mos practically, the volume offers a robust complement to the earliest letter by Williams previously in print; the main period herein represented 1902-12 (a final chapter presents key letters speaking to significant bio graphical and literary events transpiring from 1918 to 1959), occupies a slender twenty pages in John C. Thirlwall's Selected Letters. More substan tially, since Edgar was, in Williams's own words, his "first intimate" (I Wanted to Write a Poem 3), these letters offer us a fascinating view of the young Bill Williams as a private man. Williams's letters to his dear brothe "Bo," a budding and soon-to-be-successful architect, present what is likely a less-embellished portrait of the young medical student and would-be writer than that available even in the earliest Pound/Williams letters, which
Oxford Scholarship Online
This chapter explains how incorporating podcasts and multimedia sources (audio and TV clips, soci... more This chapter explains how incorporating podcasts and multimedia sources (audio and TV clips, social-media messages, etc.) into a History of English course can lead not only to the greatest student engagement but also to a significantly richer learning experience. This chapter will reflect upon both what these materials are and why they should be so meaningful for students, as well as how these materials are also satisfying and engaging to the scholar/teacher. Specific examples of podcasts, YouTube videos, and Internet memes are mentioned, along with relevant class discussion prompts or out-of-class assignments.
Wallace Stevens Journal, 2021
Wallace Stevens Journal, 2018
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 8, 2019
Modernist American poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams insisted on t... more Modernist American poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams insisted on the values of linguistic sound beyond the semantic. Stevens focused on the modulations of the sounds and lexical stresses of individual words within the meter. Frost and Williams focused on the less predictable intonational contours of phrases and sentences (although for Frost, the intonational contours play with and against the metrical pattern, whereas for Williams, lines tend to align with intonational phrases, turning prosodic speech tunes into a prosodic verse measure). Drawing on recent cognitive studies that pertain to the processing of speech sound and birdsong, this article suggests a need to revise critical assessments of the poets’ investments of belief in sound; it also considers why, given this research, Frost’s theory of sentence sounds has, perhaps unfairly, fared a worse critical reception.
The Wallace Stevens Journal, 2014
The Wallace Stevens Journal, 2013
Choice Reviews Online, 2001
... [The techniques of temporal arrangement represent an admit-tedly difficult, but rewarding fie... more ... [The techniques of temporal arrangement represent an admit-tedly difficult, but rewarding field for the investigation of works of art.]. Wolfgang Kayser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk In HISTORICAL TERMS, SEQUENTIAL DYNAMICS BELONG TO THE GENERAL category of ...
Wallace Stevens Journal, 2017
Wallace Stevens Journal, 2011
HE PROSODY of Wallace Stevens has long intrigued scholars. Unlike many of his contemporaries who ... more HE PROSODY of Wallace Stevens has long intrigued scholars. Unlike many of his contemporaries who famously composed their poetry entirely in meter (Robert Frost and E. A. Robinson), or vehemently eschewed rhyme and meter in favor of free verse (William Carlos Williams), or elected some alternate form of measure (Marianne Moore), or alternated periods of both practices (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), Stevens conveys his receptivity to what he terms both measure and free verse, provided each has any "aesthetic impulse back of it" (Letter to Ferdinand Reyher, 13 May 1921). He also frequently wrote both metrical and free-verse poems throughout his career. At times, the form of the one comments upon the other. Yet, as frequently, the two forms function more simply as different modes suited to different purposes. In his late verse, whose metricality has been questioned, we see a quasi-blank verse that is described as a nearly "free-verse line" and one that has elicited interest but not, to my knowledge, a theoretical description. In this article, I will propose one way in which Stevens' experiments with the two verse practices merge together and one way in which his late blank-verse line might serve as an unlikely bridge to what we think of as conventional free-verse lines. Before coming to the late blank verse, though, I want to look back to Stevens' earliest expressive positioning of iambic pentameter verse as a vehicle for poetry.
Wallace Stevens Journal, 2014
William Carlos Williams Review, 2009
Resources for American Literary Study, 2011
Perhaps because William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) did not explicitly assign himself the task of... more Perhaps because William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) did not explicitly assign himself the task of writing essays to explicate, advance, and defen his poetics (as he writes in the preface to his Selected Essay, he composed "prose pieces... from time to time, more or less at random, sometimes on the spur of the moment" [v]), his correspondence has continued to be of especially great interest to literary scholars. It is in individual letter found in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams that Williams most explicitly lays out some of his theories of versification, as it is in the letters of The American Idiom that Williams explores what he calls "the bedrock the mother tongue of Brooklyn, USA" (William and Norse 47). This new volume of letters to his younger brother, Edgar Irving Williams (1884-1974), not all of which were unknown before, as the thoughtful and careful editor, Andrew J. Krivak, reminds us, covers Williams's early years, from his studies at the University of Pennsylvania to the establishment o his medical practice in Rutherford, New Jersey, and promises significantl to enrich critical scholarship on early Williams in several respects. Mos practically, the volume offers a robust complement to the earliest letter by Williams previously in print; the main period herein represented 1902-12 (a final chapter presents key letters speaking to significant bio graphical and literary events transpiring from 1918 to 1959), occupies a slender twenty pages in John C. Thirlwall's Selected Letters. More substan tially, since Edgar was, in Williams's own words, his "first intimate" (I Wanted to Write a Poem 3), these letters offer us a fascinating view of the young Bill Williams as a private man. Williams's letters to his dear brothe "Bo," a budding and soon-to-be-successful architect, present what is likely a less-embellished portrait of the young medical student and would-be writer than that available even in the earliest Pound/Williams letters, which
Oxford Scholarship Online
This chapter explains how incorporating podcasts and multimedia sources (audio and TV clips, soci... more This chapter explains how incorporating podcasts and multimedia sources (audio and TV clips, social-media messages, etc.) into a History of English course can lead not only to the greatest student engagement but also to a significantly richer learning experience. This chapter will reflect upon both what these materials are and why they should be so meaningful for students, as well as how these materials are also satisfying and engaging to the scholar/teacher. Specific examples of podcasts, YouTube videos, and Internet memes are mentioned, along with relevant class discussion prompts or out-of-class assignments.
Wallace Stevens Journal, 2021
Wallace Stevens Journal, 2018