01 TTH4 CAC 12155 SHOCKLEY MU-111
Black Poetry: Black Women / Radical Writing
Poetry is the most capacious genre of literature, some would argue, because there is almost nothing you can’t do under its banner. Poets can tell stories, record experience, recount history, imagine the future, sing, theorize, show us new ways of seeing the world, question the status quo, express emotion, entertain us and make us laugh, offer political critique, and so much more, as poets since Sappho’s day have demonstrated. Because the genre is so stretchy, writers can explore or invent numerous ways to create work in poetry that pushes or transgresses boundaries of politeness, of literary convention, of social norms, and of political possibility, just for example. In this course, we will consider the relationships between radical thinking and radical forms of writing in the work of several contemporary Black women artists. Using the anthology Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, along with some supplemental poems and essays and one book of poetry by an individual poet (to be determined), we will follow Black women writers into the wilds of their imaginations and consider how they have made poetry that explodes our ideas about how language operates and who we are to each other.
We will look at (and listen to) work by predecessor poets such as Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, Wanda Coleman, and Jayne Cortez, and then trace how their concerns with Black liberation, gender and sexuality under patriarchy, the politics of empire and colonialism, and the extractive logics of capitalism have motivated and shaped their poetry and the poetry of subsequent generations of Black women artists. What worlds do their works envision? What does language make possible and how does it betray us? How do they make poems that are full of ideas, yet infuse their readers with sensory experiences that move beyond the limitations of “rational” thought? What approaches to poetics might allow them to imagine a future that they—and we—want to live in? Course requirements include mandatory attendance, regular in-class writing and participation in our collective conversations about the readings, a short paper, and a final project.