English 247 - MODES/EXPERIMENT/POSTWAR POETR

This is a class about poems that make no sense. Many would claim that these are not poems at all (they're wrong). We will survey some of the many ways poets during the last seventy years have sought to expand the boundaries of poetry, to escape assumptions about the lyric speaker and ?self,? to release the energies of sound and the non-semantic properties of language, often in hopes of contributing to social revolutions and the imagining of new ways of being in the world. We will read both poems (even the illegible ones!) and texts on poetics -- justifications, elaborations, and explanations of the poems -- and we will situate the poetic projects in the context of the broader artistic movements of which they were often a part (Dada, Oulipo, concrete poetry, sound poetry, Language poetry). Most of our reading will be in English (sort of), but we will, from time to time, drop in on important movements that originated in other linguistic cultures.