21L.004 Reading Poetry

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H

The central concern of this class is the relationship between the social lives of everyday people and contemporary poetics, with a special emphasis on what June Jordan once called “the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America”. How does poetry help us to know one another? And how might we better understand the role of poetry, of poetics, 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 read and listen to the works of Toni Morrison, Aretha Franklin, Tracy K. Smith, MF DOOM, Saul Williams, and Claudia Rankine, among others. We will compose nature poems, and meditate on the affective range of classic Motown records. We will study lyric poetry on the printed page, as well as spoken word performances that find their most vivid expression in the open air. All toward the aim of elaborating a working theory of social poetics, a poetics of sociality, made to the measure of the present day.  

Prereq: none
3-0-9 HASS-H, CI-H

An introduction to poetry in English, chiefly by British and American poets, spanning more than 400 years of literary history. The aim is to demystify “great” poetry and to analyze it collaboratively for insight and pleasure. We will explore Renaissance, eighteenth-century, Romantic, and modernist poetry in some detail. Though the organization of the subject is mostly chronological, our focus will be less on names and dates than on cultivating skills in careful reading and effective writing. Poets to be read may include William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, and Elizabeth Bishop.