Poetry Is Not a Luxury

In this course, we will examine the context and the stakes of Audre Lorde’s claim that “poetry is not a luxury,” and we will take seriously the urgency of attending to voices that speak around, above, beneath and through the gaps of hegemonic discourse —what Lorde calls the “language of the White fathers” who elevated “imagination without insight.”[1] Adrienne Rich describes this anti-poetic language as “the noise of an aggressively voiced ruling ethos, its terminology of war, success, national security, winning and losing, ownership, merchandising, canned information, canned laughter.”[2] Our course moves through and across terrain mapped by these two writers. During the first weeks of the term, we will spend time and attention on Lorde’s key essay, exploring what she says, and elaborating on her key points with the help of some key additional poets and critics, from Emily Dickinson through Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Carlos Williams and Susan Stewart. We will develop a sense of the power of poetic devices such as metaphor, allusion and rhythm. Next, we will take a look at a crucial watershed in the rise to prominence of the poetic discourse of the “White fathers”; namely, the European Renaissance. We will look at key poems that frame that discourse —writings by Ovid and Horace, Franceso Petrarca, Dante, as well as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets such as Pierre Ronsard, William Shakespeare, sir Philip Sidney, Luis de Góngora. As we will see, these poets played an important role in elaborating structures of power and notions of gender, ethnicity, race, imperialism and colonialism we seek to analyze and dismantle today. But we will also see that theirs were not the only poetic voices speaking during this period. There is a long, rich tradition of challenging the authority of the White fathers, a tradition that begins in writings by their contemporaries, poets such as Louise Labé, Juan Latino, sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. We will read this work in dialogue with twentieth and twenty-first century poetry writers and singers who seek to dismantle the power of the White fathers in the U.S.; for example, Layli Longsoldier, Tracy K. Smith, Robin Coste Lewis, Beyoncé.

Please note that this course satisfies the university US-DIA requirement. We will be discussing sensitive contemporary topics, including the uses and abuses of power, discourses of belonging and exclusion, emotional and physical violence. Students who enroll in COLT 390 agree to share in our responsibility as a classroom community to navigate these discussions with respect and compassion. We will discuss how we want to go about building our classroom community during Week 1.