Instructor: Savannah
MWF 10:10 AM – 11:05 AM
In 2018, it may seem as though we’ve come a long way from Robert Burns’ “O my Luve’s like a red, red rose.” The rose, the heart, the sun—these are now-familiar metaphors for love. But what about Mountain Dew? A Do-rag? Robo-tripping? A spider eating a lightning bug? We’ll read poems that take up these images, refiguring our common conceptions about love poetry. Mixing traditional examples of love poems with poems being written now, this class will interrogate how we think about, and write about, love in the 21st century. How do we consider love differently than Shakespeare, and how is he still relevant? (Spoiler: he is!) How are our ideas of love tied up in capitalism? How do we find unique, surprising images that relate to our own lives and explode what we have come to view as clichés about love? The course will explore jealousy, break-up poems, marriage and courtship, gender and sexuality, and we’ll read some pretty sexy poems along the way. And we’ll write them, too! Students will imitate and depart from and invent new forms for talking about love, about the loss of love, and about all the difficulties of having a body that loves and is loved and exists in a world where love can mean many, many different things.