Twenty-First Century Poetry and Poetics

Graduate / Professional

Late twentieth-century American poetry was dominated by an opposition between romantic and experimental, or lyric and anti-lyric, poetics. In the twenty-first century, that opposition has collapsed, generating new possibilities for the art. This course explores the contemporary landscape by discussing books of poetry alongside essays in poetics and literary theory. We are interested in how poems theorize themselves and in the tropological and formal dimensions of theory and criticism and the genre of the lyric essay. Our focus is primarily on US poetry, but this is an era in which US poetry understands itself in a global frame. Contexts include the 2008 financial crisis, Black Lives Matter, migration, and ecological disaster. We think about poetry and world literature, documentary poetics, poetry as notation, information technologies, and the poetics of the archive. Poets include Louise Glück, Reginald Shepherd, Claudia Rankine, Don Mee Choi, Srikanth Reddy, Wong May, Ben Lerner, Jorie Graham, Robyn Schiff, Maureen N. McLane, and Susan Howe. Readings by Lauren Berlant, Virginia Jackson, Jonathan Culler, Jahan Ramazani, Christopher Nealon, and others. W 1:30pm-3:25pm