Modern Poetry!
Taught by carrie
First David Foster Wallace. Now Alexander McQueen. Carrie sincerely hopes that Seamus Heaney is taking his blood pressure meds faithfully, because she is not sure how much more she can take.
OK, so you’re like totally Postmodern and get that, as with all art, there is no such thing as a “good” poem and a “bad” poem. Furthermore, you know that no author gets to tell YOU how to interpret THEIR work—how dare they get all up in your intellectual business? Yet somehow, when confronted with a poem, you sometimes feel a like you could use a little help. Like maybe you’re missing something that would really help you enjoy it, but you don’t know what that something is.
Well, there are different “somethings” for different genres—but they do exist. This class will attempt to show you what they are without telling you what you should like. The focus will be poems written after 1900—both the traditional and the avant-garde. We will not touch on every single genre, but modernism, formalism, beat, language, minimal, and emerging contemporary will be in the mix for sure. As will cake.
