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EN872: Provocations and Invitations: Poetry After the Second World War
30 credits, 15 ECTS credits
Convenor: Dr David Herd .
This module introduces the challenges and pleasures of postmodern poetry and poetics. We will consider a range of poetic texts, and essays on poetry, that between them raise profound questions of nation, agency, language, gender, law and migration in the post-war period. Starting with Charles Olson’s groundbreaking inquiries into ‘open field poetics’, we will investigate a range of American and British poets for whom the poem has been a way of generating new modes of thought and life. In particular we will explore the ways in which poetry of the period enables us to think through the implications of globalization. We will consider how poetry can escape the constraints of place, and how it can imagine new forms of collective identity.
Among the poets we will consider are: Olson, Frank O’Hara, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, John Weiners, Lyn Hejinian, Vanessa Place, J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley, and Tony Lopez. The work of these writers will be read alongside contemporary philosophy and political theory, and will be considered in relation to other art forms, especially painting. Students on the module will benefit from the activities of the Centre for Modern Poetry, including regular readings, research seminars and the fortnightly Modern Poetry Reading Group.
Preliminary Reading:
Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael
Charles Olson, Selected Writings (ed. Robert Creeley)
Lyn Hejinian, My Life
Denise Riley, Mop Mop Georgette