English 166 - Fall, 2023

Love & Desire in Contemporary American Poetry

Class Information

Instructor: Ronda, Margaret
CRN: 52446
Time: TR 3:10-4:30
Location: 118 Olson
GE Areas: American Cultures, Governance, and History Writing Experience

Description

This course will examine the ?lover?s discourse? of 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 philosopher Roland Barthes calls its ?last words.? This course is intended to teach students about the forms and modes of representation central to the traditions of love poetry, focusing sustained attention on key forms such as sonnets, elegies, odes, lyric, and epistolary poems and on central techniques such as apostrophe and blason. At the same time, the course will explore the innovations of modern and contemporary North American poetry, as poets experiment with old forms and invent new ones to write of the manifold experiences of love in a changing world.

Texts

Couplets: A Love Story, Maggie Millner
Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Diaz
Be Holding, Ross Gay