AML 5027 Spring 2023 Epstein

This course will provide students with a firm grounding in the major figures, movements, and innovations in American poetry since the 1970s. We will consider the consolidation of a new "mainstream" style of poetry following the upheavals of the 1960s, fostered by the growing predominance of university creative writing programs, a development which was contested by the influential avant-garde movement known as Language poetry. We will also focus on the flowering during this period of women’s poetry, inspired by the feminist movement, and poetry by Latinx, Asian American, Native American, African American, and LGBTQ writers, as American poetry becomes dramatically more diverse and open to a range of voices and identities. The course will also focus on recent, post-2000 developments in American poetry, as the poetry world explodes in a rather overwhelming profusion of directions, including the rise of Conceptual Poetry and Flarf, ecopoetics, and the resurgence of socially engaged poetry, much of it by poets of color. Poets will likely include Adrienne Rich, Robert Hass, Carolyn Forché, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Yusef Komunyakaa, Martín Espada, Juan Felipe Herrera, John Yau, Cathy Song, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey, Joy Harjo, Jorie Graham, DeanYoung, Solmaz Sharif, Ocean Vuong, Terrance Hayes, and Claudia Rankine.