In the essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes that “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” Poetry is often portrayed as a form of articulation in which thoughts and feelings can be given voice and find an audience—especially those thoughts and feelings that other forms of rhetoric, including daily speech, do not accommodate. From the intensely personal to the subversively political, poetry can therefore be a haven for ideas and emotions that hegemonic, patriarchal, capitalistic, racist, or otherwise prejudicial social frameworks frame as “unruly” or “inappropriate.” Unlike so many other forms of speech, poetic expression appears limitless in its capacity. But that appearance is also deceiving. Together, we’ll explore the following questions: What separates a revolutionary “unruly feeling” in a poem from a harmful one? What makes one poem seem like a courageous exploration while another reads as appropriative or otherwise problematic? Are there limits to what can be named and thought in a poem that differ from what can be named or thought elsewhere? The bulk of our reading will be poetry from the 20th century through to the present, and we will also read literary scholarship and theory that grapples with the question of what—if anything—is unique about poetic speech as well as the ethics of literary expression.

Major assignments will include analytical essays founded on close reading as well as a collaborative creative assignment.