Studies in Poetry (311-0-20)

Topic

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Instructors

Christine Froula

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 4-410: Mon, Wed 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

"Make It New": Ezra Pound translated this famous slogan from an ancient Chinese inscription: "As the
sun makes it new / Day by day make it new." What is "it"? What inspires poets' "making"? What makes
a poem "new"? These questions open broad reaches on the vast river of poetic traditions, materials,
techniques, and experiences that poets navigated during the long, turbulent twentieth century,
articulating poetic aims, theories, principles, and manifestos as they went. Thus Baudelaire sings the
painter of modern life; Eliot urges poets to cultivate a historical sense, a knowledge of past literature, so
as to seize what is new in their own moment; for William Carlos Williams, "So much depends / upon / a
red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens." Studying works by a range of
poets, we'll see how poems emerge in creative dialogue with other poems within and across historical
moments, locales, languages, cultural surrounds, and sensibilities. We'll hone our close reading, analytic,
and comparative skills as we think, talk, and write about the imaginative, formal, and linguistic virtuosity
of poems-as-worlds that enrich the resources of English poetry: verse lines and forms, sound patterns
(meter, rhythm, music, tone), diction, rhetoric, figurative language, personae, voices, visual arrangement.
We'll seek to deepen our powers as readers of modern poetry by appreciating poetic form and technique,
the infinite play of language, and the poets' situations, voices, addressees, audiences. We'll end with a
Poetry Fest at which everyone chooses and reads, recites, or performs a poem for the class.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area