Poetics of Water: Medium, Metaphor & Imagination in Climate Crisis

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

“What if we stun existence one more time?” writes Ayisha Siddiqa, Pakistani poet and water justice activist. As oceans heat and acidify, floods wipe out coastal populations, and polluted rivers poison communities, what will it take to literally transform the global relationships—colonial, raced, gendered, and classed—that have wreaked such destruction? Throughout this course, we will investigate how poems contain and spill ways of imagining these relationships. As we dive into the geopolitical, mythic, and ritual histories of the contemporary water crisis, we’ll examine how poems compose water, and how water composes poems–that is, how metaphors and media create and flood one another. We’ll begin the course with poems, news reports, podcasts of contemporary indigenous “water protectors,” and jump back to the primordial waters of various creation myths and flood narratives. From there, we’ll trace the emergence of global oceanic networks in the Early Modern period in courtly sonnets and Middle Passage testimonies. Animal migrations, human eroticism, and interreligious forms of prayer collect in verse at the end of the course. Assignments will include a writing journal, a podcast or experimental sound project, and a final paper.