World Poetry of the Pluriverse: Regional Forms and Global Readers

Catalog description

How do poems travel in the world? How does the world travel in poems? In this seminar, we'll read global case studies in the ways poems can sanctify or protest territorial and linguistic borders, as well as reading diverse critical accounts of the translation, marketing, and archiving of world literature. We'll study how poetry compares with other communication technologies, enacting its own forms of transit, ecology, and migration. Our readings (across all of time, though focused on the 19th-21st centuries) will investigate how race, class, and gender inflect verse's navigations of local conditions and cosmopolitan scale. Authors may include T.S. Eliot, Rabindranath Tagore, W.B. Yeats, Lorna Goodison, Yi Sang, Derek Walcott, Daphne Marlatt, Christopher Okigbo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Ilya Kaminsky, Ishion Hutchinson, and Valzhyna Mort.