African American Poetry

Catalog description

Meta duEwa Jones argues, "We cannot afford to continue to treat black poetry and poetics as loose change among the more highly valued paper currency of fiction and nonfiction prose. . . . The myriad aesthetic forms and concomitant political functions of black poetry and poetics should be seriously considered as grounds for broader and more nuanced theoretical and sociocultural claims." This course takes as its subject matter these aesthetic forms and political functions of the poetry of black America. It surveys the broad history of African American poetry and poetics, tracing the evolution of formal structures and aesthetics, but also taking a critical view of the reception of African American verse. Whether reading Phillis Wheatley or the contemporary poet Ed Roberson, all the poets included in this course have contended within the writing itself with the racially striated nature of the literary spaces they occupy. Course readings may come from poets including Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Melvin Tolson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, John Coltrane, Ishmael Reed, Nathaniel Mackey, Rita Dove, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Natasha Tretheway, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Nikky Finney, Roberson, Claudia Rankine, and others. The course addresses works by many of the key figures of this American literary tradition so that students may develop an understanding of the various contributions and legacies formal, musical, cultural, critical, political of African American poetry from the eighteenth century to today. Scholarly readings accompany primary texts to give students a sense of the critical work that has gone into and continues to go on in the study of African American poetry and poetics. The course surveys early African American poetry through works from the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, and through contemporary movements and formations. Topics will cover a range of thematic and formal issues relevant to individual poets, to major movements and periods, to regions, and to various smaller organizations and collectives. Course assignments, lectures, and discussions engage students in critical work that requires careful attention to form, content, and context such that all students might strengthen their explicatory skills and approach course figures and texts from an informed, analytical perspective.