COML 6865 - [Contemporary Poetry and Poetics]

(crosslisted) ENGL 6880

Fall. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students. Co-meets with AMST 4880/COML 4860/ENGL 4960/SPAN 4880.

J. Monroe.

What gives contemporary poetry and poetics its resonance and value? What are its dominant features, audiences, and purposes? What does 21st-century poetry’s environment look like, and how does it situate itself among other genres, discourses, disciplines, media? How would we describe its ambient noise and how does that noise shape, inform, inflect its particular concerns and motivated forms? How are we to understand its relation to the pivotal developments of our time? This seminar will explore these and related questions in a range of works from the past two decades that open onto the rich interplay of contemporary poetry and poetics with questions especially of language, aesthetics, and politics.