A
survey course with emphasis on contemporary poetry expressing national,
ethnic, racial, and gender identity in innovative forms
Schedule -
Reading - Grading/Policies
-
Susan
Tichy's Main Page
"As
a concept, identity can be defined as the search for self and its relationship
to social
contexts and realities." --Sandra Carlton Alexander
The
Oxford Companion to African American Literature
"Who I
am is a political question, but who I can be is a question that literature
can help
me to answer." -- Harryette Mullen
Our readings
will model two approaches: reading in the poetry of a single group over
time, and reading in a single time period and genre across several groups.
Using a combination of anthologies and individual volumes we will sample
the work of African-American, Asian-American, Anglophone-Caribbean, Nuyorican,
and Scottish poets.
“Identity poetics” as concept and practice is the product
of several distinct
movements
and moments in the history of poetry. In each of these moments, poets of
a
particular
social, political or racial identity fashioned a subject position apart
from the
mainstream,
composed of both aesthetic and socio-political affinities. Writers as
temporally
and culturally distant as eighteenth-century Scots-language poets and
20th-century
American poets of the Black Arts Movement have shared these qualities and
provided
models for others who sought a coherent expression of poetic difference.
Most familiar
American identity poetry of the last thirty years is based on belief in
an ontologically
authentic self and in natural, unmediated expression. Voice is often taken
as synonymous
with self, while authenticity is judged by the poem’s ability to represent
personal
and cultural experience at the level of narrative content. Our readings
will
include
some poets in this mode, but our emphasis will be on poets who continue
the
longer
tradition of poets on social peripheries questioning the very ideas of
“natural
expression”
and “authentic experience” in a language and literary tradition as varied,
conflicted,
and contested as the one we call “English poetry.” From Amiri Baraka and
Nathaniel Mackey emphasizing verb over noun, process over stasis, to Scottish
poet W.N. Herbert claiming that to write in either pure English or pure
Scots is, for him, a lie, to Harryette Mullen’s “mongrel lyric” crossing
African-American oral traditions with the print cultures of
experimental
poetry and modern theory, our poets both give more and ask more than a
popular
affirmation of diversity at the level of content. Their relations with
poetic
tradition,
with identity politics, and with each other are complex and often surprising.
Additional
poets featured include: Kamau Brathwaite, C.S. Giscombe, Tom
Leonard,
David Kinloch, W.N. Herbert, Edwin Torres, Myung Mi Kim, and Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha. Reading includes poems in Scots, in the Caribbean vernacular
or “nation language,”
poems
based on jazz forms and on hip-hop performance modes, visual poems, and
multi-genre
collage.
Requirements:
lots of reading, 2 short papers, 2 take-home essay exams, active
participation
in discussions, attendance at one or more poetry readings, & a few
trips to
the Johnson
Center Reserve Desk to listen to our poets on tape and CD.