Spring 2025
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
An introduction to poetry in English. We will explore poems written during several periods and in several genres (nature-poems, narratives, the epic, sonnets, odes, experimental forms). Focus will be less on names and dates than on tactics of analytic reading. Poets whose work we’ll read include William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, June Jordan, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Li-young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and others. Special course-related events (readings, lectures, film screenings) will take place on selected evenings throughout the term. Regular classroom hours will be reduced in the weeks for which a special event is scheduled.
[Pre-1900]
Prereq: none
Units: 3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H
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 the practice of writing and reading poetry help us to know ourselves, as well as 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 Phillis Wheatley, Toni Morrison, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Lucille Clifton, Sun Ra, Hortense Spillers, Stevie Wonder, Harryette Mullen, and Fred Moten, among others. All toward the end of elaborating in concert a working theory of black poetics, a poetics of black 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 ongoing catastrophe, a 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.