Poetry of Migration

Catalog description

What does it mean to be "a nation of immigrants," a "melting pot" of cultures, peoples, and histories from elsewhere? Who are the "huddled masses yearning to be free" that the words on the Statue of Liberty ("Mother of Exiles") claim to welcome? How have different immigrant communities conceptualized the American Dream? With a view to the notion of the artist as an outsider, as a figure who draws his or her authority not from proximity to but, paradoxically, remoteness from centers of power, we will explore these questions through a survey of modern and contemporary poetry in the United States, from Robert Hayden and Agha Shahid Ali to Solmaz Sharif and Monica Youn. We will tackle issues of assimilation and alienation, naturalization and foreignness, linguistic code-switching and exophony. We will study how migrant poets have adapted one of the most ancient narrative tropes - that of the nostos or homecoming - to represent the discovery, founding, or rejection of a home away from home. And we will learn about how these poets have drawn upon their increasingly marginalized art-form's association with outsiderhood to establish their own poetic authority.