First-Year Writing Seminar: What Are Poets For?

Catalog description

“What are poets for in a destitute time?” asked philosopher Martin Heidegger, meditating on the place and usefulness of poetry in the modern world. Poets and philosophers have often wondered about each other and sought inspiration in each other’s work. Historically, poets were seen as frivolous or even dangerous by philosophers. Plato proposed banning them from the republic. Heidegger proposes a dialogue between the two, suggesting that poets attempt to express an ‘unconcealedness of being’ with an immediacy that philosophers can learn from, and that poets can offer a path in a destitute time.What happens when this dialogue takes place; when the border between genres is blurred or willfully ignored? This course takes up this conversation in the work of several contemporary poets, and looks at the philosophers who inspire them through the lens of their poetry. We read philosophers who write with the grace and depth of poets, and poets who enlarge the scope of their investigations with the rigor and clarity of philosophers. We look at how they influence and inspire each other, and ask what they have to tell us about how to live today. How can they help us unconceal our own being, and illuminate the dangers of our own destitute time? Students will write several analytic essays exploring this dialogue through close readings of texts on the syllabus, and write a philosophical-poetic project of their own, inspired by the readings. Authors are likely to include Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Fred Moten, Mahmoud Darwish, Sara Ahmed, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Byung Chul Han, Aimé Césaire, and Heraclitus.