Laura T. Smith: Teaching

(Photo: a text installation from "Jenny Holzer: For London," which appeared throughout the city in April 2007. Text taken from Samuel Beckett.)

This course will introduce you to key issues and methods of inquiry in the field of English, while investigating major trends in poetry, primarily British and American. We will balance our time between “classics” and experimental or avant-garde texts, both old and new. For example, as we learn about poetic form, we'll pay particular attention to the poems that invented (and are inventing) the rules of form. We’ll also examine other formal techniques, including meter, rhyme, and figurative language, noting how poems select their particular formalisms and how they achieve their effects. Lastly, we’ll investigate what rules of form are being developed by contemporary poetries, including sound poetry, visual poetry, hypertext poetry, and text-image art.

Alongside our investigation of poetic form, we’ll also examine the historical contexts that shape the ideas and material conditions of literature. To this end, we’ll pay attention to social, political, and technological developments at key moments in poetic history. Finally, we’ll turn to questions of use: Does poetry continue to be a viable form of literature? What are poetry’s particular uses? We’ll explore these questions by examining reception practices and cultural contexts, both historical and contemporary.