Contemporary American Poetry

Undergraduate

This course explores the most exciting developments in American poetry from 1960 until the present. We will consider a wide array of poetic movements—the Beats, the New York School, the Confessionals, the Black Mountain group, the Black Arts Movement, Language poets, performance and conceptual poetry, rap and spoken word—in order to understand the aesthetic tendencies that inform American poetries being written today. In particular, we will examine key individual poets through close readings of their most exemplary work.