Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Advanced seminar on selected works of North American poets and/or poetry theorists. May be organized by author, genre, or critical approach. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

What makes a long poem long might be a question which seems to have an obvious answer (umm, the length?). Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in her book on long poems, focuses instead on longing: that is, something in the poet—some feeling, some desire, some aspiration—requires the room a long poem provides in order to explore their longing. For American poet Robert Duncan, what he had to say had, as he wrote, “no beginning and no end.” Thus long poems have something to do with process, and with a resistance to ending or finishing: long poems long to outlast time itself.

In this course we will read examples of contemporary long poems that exemplify the various ways (forms, modes) long poems are made long, as outlined in DuPlessis’s long essay. But at one level, this course is simply an opportunity to read a number of exciting long poems: a contemporary speculative (and fantastical) climate change epic, attempts to redress the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of North America via the re-appropriation of colonial documents, and the collected poems of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb, which both includes long poems and perhaps itself forms one meta-long poem. Several of our poets will visit our class, and class members will be invited to the second annual Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading, at the end of the semester.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: