Instructor: Noehre
MWF 11:15 AM – 12:10 PM
In recent years, continuous police killings of Black Americans, mass incarceration, and catastrophes abroad in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan, Colombia, to name a small few— 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? As a class, we will uncover our personal and collective answers to that question, and examine the ways that poetry intersects with social change. We will discuss poetry as it relates to abolition, poetry that empowers us to break our own personal silences, how the personal is political, the poem as a historical artifact, poetry that adds to or modifies the archive, and poetry as it relates to occupation and resistance. Over the semester students will engage in rigorous study and discussion, create, and share original creative work, experiment with poetic forms and techniques, and gain techniques for revision and crafting a portfolio of poems. At the end of the semester, students will turn in a portfolio of 3 original poems, 3 revisions of original poems, and a brief reflection on the decisions they made in the revision process. Central authors of this course include Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Courtney Faye Taylor, and Mosab Abu Toha.