Poetics of the Cosmos: Verse, Universe, and Existence

Catalog description

When encountering a night sky full of stars, we might feel struck by wonder, uncertainty, love, or maybe an unnamable mood. “Everyone arrives one day and asks, is this it? And the stars answer back with more stars,” poet Victoria Chang writes. In this class, we’ll survey possibilities for engaging creatively with the existence of an endlessly elusive universe. Artists to be engaged with include 20th and 21st century poets, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers—from Tracy K. Smith, David Bowie, and Stanley Kubrick, to Italo Calvino, Agnes Martin, and Maya Angelou—who through their visions of stars, planets, and extraterrestrial lifeforms, come to question the nature of the cosmos.