Disobedience: The Defiance of Genre in Contemporary English Language Poetry

Harvard HDS

Although herself a poet, and describing poetry as the site of contemporary writing's most intense creativity, Eileen Myles argues that "a lot of things that people like are beginning to need to happen in the same pieces of writing and those things may be gossip, theory, sexual description, or simply an implication that it's there or just happened (art)." We will explore this principled disobedience -- an aesthetic, philosophical, and perhaps also a theological act -- through the reading of…