Poetry Without Borders

Without borders, can there be poetry? The border of white paper surrounds printed poems; national boundaries keep cultural and linguistic traditions distinct, and aesthetic practice and its conventions create genres and demarcate poetry from music, dance, or film. How poetry requires but also perversely challenges these limits is the subject of this course. The course studies the cultural practice of poetry, with an emphasis on contemporary poetry. We examine four kinds of borders—performative, linguistic, geographic, and aesthetic. That yields four large topics: poetry in and about public places (for example, how does poetry speak to public life, including political life? How does poetry address experiences of trauma and harm? What ethical challenges loom large in poetic practice?); poetry and translation (what happens when poems cross languages? How should we read mixed-language or macaronic poems?); poetry, confinement, and migration (what happens when poets cross geographic borders? What do they hear in a new language and in their own? How have current crises around border crossings and around incarceration affected poetic practices?); and poetry and the other arts (how have the cross-influences of music, film, dance, the visual arts, and photography been felt in poetry? How do poems become visual artifacts or scripts for performance?). Students read, listen to, and learn from Laurie Anderson, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Howe, Ilya Kaminsky, Ada Limón, Alice Oswald, Tracy K. Smith, Layli Long Soldier, Fyodor Svarovsky, and C. D. Wright.