(Begins October 19th.) When we read “modernist” works we tend to focus on Anglo-American models,for various reasons: the English-speaking work was the epicenter–of the experimental poetic work of the early 20th century. For various reasons, other cultures experienced the Modernist dynamic differently. In this subject we read major work by artists in cultures that –because of different linguistic, political, historical, and psychological reasons–processed this expansive, reformative experimental energy in different ways. We read Russian models [Anna Akhmatova], German and Austrian [Bertold Brecht, Georg Trakl], Afro-Caribbean, [Aime Cesaire], Japanese [Yukio Mishima], Spanish and Latin American [Federico Garcia Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, J. L. Borges, Pablo Neruda]. We also visit some of the “alternative” modes of Modernism that thrived in the US and Britain in parallel to the “canonical” version propounded by Eliot, Pound, and Williams: works by poets including Langston Hughes, HD, Jean Toomer, and Stevie Smith]
