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CS92PROD
Special Topics: Ecopoetics - Experimental Poetry in the Anthropocene
ENGL 340
Spring 2024
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: ENVS 330

How do poets speak for and from a world in flux and crisis? How do poets register and attempt to restore the degradation of the planet through language? How might altering the boundaries of conventional language use "through poetry" alter the bounds of conventional thinking and behaving, thus leading to more engaged and sustainable modes of living? This course, in part, will serve as a tour of contemporary eco-poets invested in looking at and caring for the current state of our planet through poetry. We will read poems that reflect the most critical environmental concerns of our time, and we will learn to see how these poems resist closure and are instead guided by exploration and interrogation in an attempt at reorienting our attention and intention as inheritors of this planet.

This is an advanced workshop for students committed to developing an understanding of eco-poetry's place in the more-than-literary world, as well as developing a personal eco-poetics from which to write. Students will choose an environmental topic to research and write in service of for the semester and, by the end of the semester, will have a project-centered collection of poems. There will be bi-weekly presentations on the poetry collections we read, in-class writing experiments, in-the-field experiments, and intensive workshops of participants' work. The class will culminate in an eco-book arts project and a reflective essay.

Special attention will also be given to cultivating community and the benefits of sustaining an embodied artistic practice during extreme times and how doing so may benefit the health of the whole artist.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL
Course Format: DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: (ENGL216 AND ENGL336) OR ENGL337
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (ENGL)(ENGL-Creative W)(ENVS-MN)(ENVS)
Past Enrollment Probability: 90% or above

Last Updated on APR-29-2024
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