Reading For Writers: Documentary Poetics will explore the generative and intertextual possibilities of using poetry to document a moment in history, at both the micro and macro levels. How can documentation as an active process help us understand political moments, our political and historical selves, the personal psychologies and pathologies that drive us as writers? Students will locate themselves as readers and writers in the collision between first-person experience and socio-historical reality, working to better understand the efficacy of documentary process as both 1) a mode for poetic inquiry and 2) a methodology for the poet’s construction of new creative work. Students should be prepared to consider non-poetry texts, as well as published works that incorporate hybrid forms and vocabularies, ranging from transcripts, found-language text, historical imagery and documents, photography, and many others. Via a hearty reading list of poetry and experimental texts, we will consider how craft-driven and contextually aware reading practices may help us better achieve the effects we wish to see in our own writing. Weekly creative activities, exercises, and poetry prompts will compliment ongoing literary analysis responses culminating in a final paper of students’ own design. Works by Layli Long Soldier, Maggie Nelson, Mark Nowak, Claudia Rankine, Philip Metres, and Don Mee Choi, among many others, will be considered.

In Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities, Alfred Arteaga suggests, “for [Octavio] Paz, the border is a thin one and across it ‘Even the birds speak English’ […] What is difficult for Paz is to consider a thick border.” In this course, students will explore “thick descriptions” of thickening borders of the Americas. Students will address the possibility of a bilingual poetics—laterally—examining representations of bi- or multicultural subjectivities. Central to the discussion will be the conceit of code-switching, a linguistic term, which designates a speaker or writer’s facility to move between languages. Students will approach code-switching literally to acquaint themselves with work that shuttles between Spanish and English, as well as metaphorically—dehyphenating it—to address the hybridity of twentieth/twenty-first century poetry.