AP/EN 4402 3.00

Late 20th-Century Black Poetics

This course introduces students to Black poets living and writing in Canada and the United States in the late 20th century. It focuses on developing close reading skills to better understand what poetry is and how we experience the poetic, as well as critical debates within American studies around race, gender, class, and sexuality. This seminar uses the long 1980s as a provocation to explore the entanglements between history, politics, and poetry, with particular attention to a comparison between Canadian and American cultural and political contexts. We will privilege Black poetic production as a vantage point to speculate on how we, in the present, continue to live with the ghosts of the 1980s. This course offers an expansive consideration of what some critics call 'political poetry.' By focusing on poetry books published in and around the 1980s in Canada and the United States, we will think through post-NY school, language, eco-, improvisational, confessional, avant-garde, feminist, visual, and performance poetry. We will pay close attention to the formal and conceptual elements of poetry such as imagery, sound, rhythm, tone, figures, and metaphors. What are the historical and political stakes of form, imagery, and rhyme? How do poets approach these seemingly mundane aspects of poetic writing in order to imagine their experience of living and writing in the 1980s? What does it mean to be in, but not of a political regime?