Overview
If, as is understood by the faculty, much of the anxiety about contemporary poetry can be described as an identity crisis — if it is a struggle between the old and the new cast as one having to do with voice, theme, and tradition — then who can inherit the future of poetry is cut along gendered and racialized lines.
We begin from the supposition that poetry is a radical refutation of the world-as-it-is, and as such, is and has been the province of minoritized peoples.
We will think together about poetry as a vehicle of liberation and protest; about subjectivity and embodiment as poetry’s context; and about how race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability pressurize aesthetic categories.
