Course No: 350:505
Index #: 19048
Distribution Requirement: A5, C
Tuesdays - 10:20 am
MU 207
Queer Poetry and Poetics
Grogan, Kristin
This course reads queer poetry, focused predominantly but not exclusively on Anglo-American poetry of the twentieth century. Some of the questions we’ll be approaching: what is a queer poetic tradition? What is queer about poetic form—in other words, what is a queer poetics? How is queerness embedded in ideas of the avant-garde or ‘experimental’ literature?
We’ll approach questions of history and queer lineage; relationality, community, coteries, friendship, rivalry; identity and identification; the relationship between the lyric speaker, lyric address and questions of disclosure, secrecy, outness and the closet; the place of poetry in liberationist movements, historical and contemporary; canons and canonicity; queer and intimate poetic archives.
We’ll also tackle some meta-disciplinary questions. How did poetry—as opposed, to, say, the emphasis on character-formation in narrative—figure in the emergence and development of queer theory, and how does it figure today? What interpretive questions does taking poetry as our object of study allow us to open? What methods of reading—close, distant, reparative, surface—does queer poetry invite us to engage?
Provisional reading list:
- Predecessors: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman; some queer late Victorian/proto-modernist poetry
- Queer Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Richard Bruce Nugent; blues recordings and blues poetry
- Lesbian modernism: Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, HD
- The New York School: Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, V.R. "Bunny" Lang, Joe Brainard, Eileen Myles
- Black queer feminist poetry: Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni
- The poetry of AIDS: Tim Dlugos, Essex Hemphill, Mark Doty, Thom Gunn
- + various contemporary poets: Jos Charles; Kay Gabriel; Danez Smith; C.A. Conrad; Trish Salah, Ari Banias; Ching-in Chen;
We’ll read poetry alongside critics and theorists including: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; Lauren Berlant; José Esteban Muñoz; Brian Glavey; Juno Richards; Benjamin Kahan; Chad Bennett; Michael Snediker; Sara Ahmed; Chris Nealon; Melanie Micir; Sarah Schulman; Kadji Amin; Emma Heaney; Sianne Ngai.
Assessment:
- Participation and contribution to class discussions, including preparation and reading.
- A class presentation and leading some of class discussion for one session.
- A longer paper, that will be developed and collaboratively workshopped int eh second half of the semester.