Stephanie Sandler
Gen Ed 1057 | Last offered Spring 2024
Why do poems and poets today boldly cross the borders of language, geography, form, and how are those border-crossings charged politically, ethically, and aesthetically?
Without borders, can there be poetry? The border of white paper surrounds printed poems; national boundaries keep cultural and linguistic traditions distinct; and aesthetic practice and its conventions create genres and demarcate poetry from music or dance or film. How poetry requires but also perversely challenges these limits will be the subject of this course.
The course studies the cultural practice of poetry, with an emphasis on contemporary poetry. We will examine four kinds of borders – performative, linguistic, geographic, and aesthetic. That yields four large topics: poetry in and about public places (how does poetry speak to public life, including political life? How does poetry address experiences of trauma and harm? What ethical challenges loom large in poetic practice?); poetry and translation (what happens when poems cross languages? how to read mixed-language or macaronic poems?); poetry, confinement, and migration (what happens when poets cross geographic borders? what do they hear in a new language and, as a result, in their own? how do mixed identities and allegiances work? how have the current crises around border crossings and around incarceration affected poetic practices?); and poetry and the other arts (how have the cross-influences of music, film, dance, the visual arts, and photography been felt in poetry? how do poems become visual artifacts, or scripts for performance?).
We will read, listen to, and learn from Laurie Anderson, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, Jorie Graham, Eliza Griswold, Susan Howe, Ilya Kaminsky, Daniil Kharms, Eugene Ostashevsky, Yang Lian, Valzhyna Mort, M. NourbeSe Philip, Tracy K. Smith, C. D. Wright, and others.
The course culminates in a final creative project, and it will also have an engaged learning component. Students will explore poetry outside the classroom and engage with communities beyond Harvard.