Courses

This seminar explores the relationship between history and poetry. Focusing on the 1980s, also known as the Reagan era, we will privilege poetic production as a vantage point to think about this tumultuous period in the U.S. What is the relationship between this historical conception of the Reagan era and the poetic sensibility fostered in and against those social political conditions? By focusing on reading poetry books published in the 1980s, we will think through post-NY school, language, eco-, improvisational, confessional, avant-garde, feminist, visual, and performance poetry. What the political stakes of formal poetic concerns?