We will be reading a somewhat various selection of contemporary poetry, focusing on language writing, but looking as well at Black Mountain, New York school work; identity poetries; the Caribbean nation-poetry of Brathwaite, etc. As occasion demands, we will also read some modernists. At a minimum, you will come away with empirical knowledge of a good range of poetry.

The more ambitious dimensions of the course will involve trying to bridge the gap between poetry and theory. (By "theory" I'm intending a range of poststructuralist, feminist, marxist, & postcolonial work.) Some contemporary poetry --generally but not exclusively language writing-- has been enacting some of the political and epistemological textuality upon which some contemporary theorists have speculated and/or pronounced. And yet there is a global scope to most theory that cannot easily adjust its sights to the empirical level of a specific poem. We will see how useful the poetry and the theory are for reading one another.