Postmodern Poetry and Poetics
This course considered the writing of a number of a handful of postmodern poets whose work and poetics exhibit a range of responses to the cultural and political dominants of contemporary life. While three are sometimes associated with Language Poetry (Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe), the remaining three are more frequently positioned in cultural terms (Kamau Brathwaite, Nathanial Mackey, Cecilia Vicuņa) Each of the authors variously engages with ideology, cultural memory, and identity in creative and sometimes, challenging ways. The stylistic and socio-cultural range of the writing provides the opportunity to consider how language and poetic form intersect with, reflect, resist, and refigure one's experience of the world and of reading itself.
Taking Paul Naylor's Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History--which treats four of the poets--as an orienting critical study, the course allowed students to test Naylor's framework in reading the untreated poets. Further, a peculiarly allusive or suggestive use of theory in the Naylor study provided the impetus for students to test out the relevance of various philosophical paradigms through discussion and their own writing. (Wittgenstein, Benjamin, DeCertau)
The course also incorporates web-based resources (EPC) and audio recordings of the poets in performance and interviews.