English 166 - Winter, 2018

Love & Desire in Contemporary American Poetry

Class Information

Instructor: Ronda, Margaret
CRN: 74424
Time: MWF 9:00-9:50
Location: 106 Olson

Description

This course will examine the “lover’s discourse” of late twentieth- and twenty-first- century American poetry. We will consider how poems represent the various states and stages of eros through different genres, tropes, and figures. We will also explore the necessarily political and cultural valences of love, from queer intimacies to ecological interrelation to revolutionary desire. And we’ll think, as well, about how various poems portray the ends of love, what Roland Barthes calls its “last words.” Authors will include O’Hara, Ginsberg, Plath, Baraka, Lorde, Mayer, Notley, clifton, Rich, Carson, Conrad, Brolaski, Bernes, Nguyen, Nelson, and Spahr.

Texts

Bluets, Maggie Nelson
this connection of everyone with lungs, Juliana Spahr
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay
Oxford Book of American Poetry, David Lehman