Course Meeting Times
Lecture/discussion: 1.5 hours/session; 2 sessions/week
Prerequisites
No prerequisites.
Course Description
The central concern of this class is the historical relationship between the social lives of everyday people and U.S. American poetics, with a special emphasis on what June Jordan once termed the “difficult miracle of Black poetry in America.” How does poetry help us to know one another? And how might we better understand the particular role of poetry, of poiesis, for those historically barred from the very practice of reading or writing, from ownership (even of one’s own body), and various generally recognized forms of belonging? For the purposes of this course, these will be some of our animating questions.
As a group, we will study the works of Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Jericho Brown, and Stevie Wonder, among others, largely toward the end of elaborating, in concert, a working theory of social poetics, a poetics of sociality, a new way for us to be together in a cultural moment marked by distance, as well as the disintegration of the public commons. In the midst of this ongoing catastrophe, this state of emergency and emergence, this course will seek to chart a way forward using the instruments left to us by luminaries both dead and living, a cloud of witnesses beckoning us toward a future with room enough for all of us to flourish.
Grading
Attendance/Participation (25%): Students are expected to arrive at class on time, having completed assigned readings and prepared to make informed contributions to class discussions.
Midterm (30%): At the midpoint of the term, students will hand in a review essay of a poetry collection written within the past 5 years that calls upon the themes we have covered in class.
Poetry Archive Readings (10%): Students will attend at least one of the organized readings during the term.
Final Project (35%): Students will create an adaptation of one of the texts we have studied over the course of the term.
