Faculty First Year Seminars 197UW1 - ELECTION YEAR POETRY

Are you curious about politics or poetry? Where might they meet? Eileen Myles, poet and `92 presidential candidate, writes, ?what is a political poem today and how do we describe, experience, understand the intimate balance going on between information, sentiment and aesthetics that determines how we read a poem and whether it even seems political to us.? Join at this round-table where we?ll look at poetry as a response to politics and as a political act in itself. Our emphasis will be poems written during this election cycle. We?ll study important political poems of the past as well as poems written for recent U.S. presidential inaugurations, and we?ll discuss the historical situation of those creations. And we?ll dabble with our own writing in the context of this year?s election.

Freshmen Only