COML 1113 - FWS: Poetry’s Image

Fall, Spring. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

First-Year Writing Seminar.

Staff.

Where do we get our images of poetry, and of poets? Along with the images we find in poems themselves, how do poetry and poets figure in fiction and film, in philosophy and popular culture? How do such figures inform the images in poems, poetry’s image? In what senses is poetry a “liberal art”? What is its relation to “self,” to language, history, and politics, to other disciplines and discourses? This course will explore such issues in a wide range of short texts in both verse and prose, in fiction, film, and other media. The course’s focus on “poetry image” will encourage students to make the connection between such self-reflexive practices in the texts they’re reading and viewing and the texts they themselves produce in their own writing. Authors that we will study include Plato, Wordsworth, Poe, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Whitman, Rimbaud, Stein, Breton, Stevens, Neruda, Borges, Wittgenstein, Celan, Rich, Brathwaite, Waldrop, Collins, Swenson, and Bolaño.