ENGL 664-01: American Poetry: Afterlives of the Lyric

Section Description:

What was lyric poetry? This course reads an array of US poets whose work negotiates the question of genre in the period of the lyric’s afterlives, roughly since 1914. We will also explore how the belatedness of the lyric has shaped the work of recent critics and theorists. Does the idea of the lyric as a lapsed genre reshape our view of poetry’s relation to history? Or of the time in which a poem happens? If electronics have altered our approaches to textual and archival studies, do these technologies render an idea of the lyric that is compatible with ongoing experiments in digital poetics? We’ll read poetry by Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others; as well as theory and criticism by Virginia Jackson, Northrop Frye, Barbara Johnson, John Stuart Mill, the Mongrel Coalition against Gringpo, and others.