Instructor: Noehre | WF 09:30 AM – 10:50 AM
Following June Jordan, who tells us “Poetry is a political action,” this course takes up poetry in relation to social change. From 2020 to our present moment, genocides in Palestine and Sudan, increase in ICE/CBP deportations and their killings of civilians, continuous police killings of Black Americans, mass incarceration, imperial/colonial/capitalist brutalities in the Congo, Haiti, Afghanistan, Colombia, to name only a handful of global catastrophes we face—have brought to the writing world an urgent question— in the face of all of this real-world collapse and immense global struggle: what can a poem do? This question will be a meeting place for us this semester and will likely be a place of many tensions, both communal and personal. But the ways we might find to answer it will also be the openings that let us ask poetry to do more for us, for our beloveds, and for the causes we wish to be in service of.
This course is divided into two parts: lecture and workshop. Lectures/discussions of texts will be held on Wednesdays, and workshops on Fridays. In our Wednesday meetings, we will discuss the work of politically engaged poets together and learn about various craft and revision techniques. In Friday workshops, students will share their work with the group and receive thoughtful feedback from their peers on their writing.
We will read works by Solmaz Sharif, Wendy Trevino, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Andrea Abi-Karam, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Mosab Abu Toha, Diane di Prima, and more. All backgrounds and experience levels are welcome!