Love & Desire in Contemporary American Poetry
Class Information
Instructor: Kitses, Jasmine
CRN: 92110
Time: TR 4:40-6:00
Location: 6 Wellman
Description
Is poetry an act of desire? Poets often write about desire, love, and longing, but why is the poetic form particularly suited to this subject matter? In this course, we will trace the entanglement of poetry and desire through poetic works of the twentieth- and twenty-first- century, exploring love and desire in its many forms and configurations—from absence to longing, togetherness to repudiation. We’ll consider love between lovers, platonic love, queer love, and revolutionary love. We’ll also explore desire in the form of the poem itself—the shapes that occur in the attempt to put words to the unsayable.
Grading
2 papers
3 blog posts
quizzes
final
Texts
Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry V.2, Eds. Ramazani, Ellman, O'Clair
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay
Bluets, Maggie Nelson
Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, Danez Smith