20th-Century Poetry

This class sets course through 21st century poetry written and translated into English, focusing entirely on how poets write across cultures. Certain topics will seem particularly modern: ecopoetics, #BlackLivesMatter, and social media. Other topics will raise important and enduring questions: How do poets influence other poets? How do poems speak to oneanother? What can poetry learn from other arts? And what is a poem anyways? This course will introduce students to the practice of reading and writing about contemporary works of poetry in order to gain a keen understanding of how our own social, political, and cultural locations influence our readings of texts, and how diverse voices and experiences resonate cross-culturally. We'll discuss the boundaries and borders of poetry, what it means to think of poetry as a representation of our society and of our world, and how poetry reflects and speaks to our current political, economic, and social realities. We will also analyze the forms and modes that define contemporary poetry, and how these forms and modes are changed and adapted by poets of different races, genders, sexualities, nationalities, backgrounds, lineages and traditions. In the first half of the semester, we will work on a small-scale version of the primary prose genre of contemporary poetry criticism-the book review. In the second half of the semester, our writing will culminate in a final paper dealing with poetry and various aspects of globalization. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond. Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; EL TC; EL GML; FA HUM; AR HUM

20th-Century Poetry

ENGLISH LITERATURE 3571

Section 01