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Text Box: Literary Types: American Poetry Barbara Cole MWF 10:00 - 10:50 Reg. No. 396585

Text Box: Exploring a wide-range of poetic forms--including the elegy, epic, free verse, lyric, modern long poem, sonnet, sestina, and villanelle--we will broaden our conception of what constitutes poetry. What does a poem look like? How is a poem different from prose? What purpose does poetry serve? As we attempt to answer these questions, we will employ the specialized vocabulary of poetic study--line, stanza, page space, prosody, meter, and rhyme--to assist us in our close readings of poems. Beginning with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as the “founding father” and “founding mother” of a distinctly American voice, poets to be studied include (in chronological order and according to “movement”): Modernists: Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H.D., Dylan Thomas Objectivists: Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky Harlem Renaissance & After: Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka Beats: Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman Black Mountain: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan New York School: Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Harryette Mullen. As it is one of the unique privileges of being at UB to find ourselves at the locus of contemporary American poetry, we will pay attention to the particular history of poetry on our own campus by looking at Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Carol Dennis, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and Myung Mi Kim. Our historical investigation will conclude in the present with UB alumni writing now in the 21st century (Lisa Jarnot, Anselm Berrigan, Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr) to consider how these poets attest to the emergence of a hybrid form that merges all of the American movements we studied individually. Texts: Cary Nelson, ed. Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000). Critical essays and additional texts available via on-line course reserve. Course requirements: Regular attendance, engaged reading, and active participation are essential. In addition to one in-class presentation, students will be required to write weekly journal responses (1-2 pages each) and two formal papers (5-7 pages each). Emily Dickinson once noted in a letter to a friend: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Aspiring to this level of enthusiastic engagement and physical encountering with poetry, students are additionally required to attend and review at least one poetry reading occurring within the Buffalo “poetry scene” (either on or off campus).