Kursinformation

Course Description: This course focuses not only on poetry by queer American authors, but also on the queerness that inheres in certain poetic styles, rhetoric, and figurative language. The course, in other words, uses the content of poetry “about” queerness and by queer authors as a way into formal questions of queer style and queer (dis)figuration. In what sense is poetics queer? How does figurative language express or enact queerness? And why have so many queer poets turned to lyric poetry as a privileged form of expression? In the class, students will be introduced to a broad historical tradition of queer American lyric poetry: We will begin with two canonical 19^th-century poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and work our way through the 20^th-century to the contemporary moment by reading authors such as Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, June Jordan, Essex Hemphill, Ocean Vuong, and Eduardo C. Corral.