What Is Poetry (Graduate Seminar)

“I, too, dislike it.” That is how Marianne Moore begins “Poetry,” a poem that then attempts to define the thing it claims to dislike—a distaste that it assumes (“I, too, dislike it”) you share. 

This course will, in some sense, follow Moore’s strategy: We’ll begin by confronting our resistance to poetry head-on, asking where such a distaste comes from, and then teasing out the implicit understandings (of poetry, language, our selves) that activate these forms of skepticism. Is there something called “poetic language” that is fundamentally different from “ordinary language”? Where does the idea that poetry, more than any other form of literature, is centrally concerned with (and representative of) consciousness come from? What kinds of poetry does such an idea allow, and what kinds of poetry does it marginalize or obscure? These are some of the questions that will animate our discussions.

Letters, Texts, Twitter

How do letters bring together distant lovers, friends, family? What forms of intimacy follow from such textual exchanges? When literature borrows from this kind of writing, how is it changed?  This course examines epistolary writing, broadly speaking: We’ll read letters, the newer digital forms (email, social media, instant messaging) that have largely replaced them, and the literary representations of the epistolary in modern and contemporary novels, poems, and essays. Our goal will be to study how writing allows intimacies to form across spatial and temporal distances.