ENG 328-01 - Studies in American Poetry II

4 credits (Fall)

Beat, Black, and (Sometimes) Blue: Poetry of the ‘50s and ‘60s from San Francisco, Black Mountain, and the Black Arts Movement. In this course we will explore poetry that breaks out of what Robert Bly called “the new critical jail,” as well as poetry that resists what Haki Madhubuti called the “protective custody” of cultural institutions dominated by white wardens and masters. Some members of this generation went from “liking Ike” to hiking out, as far out as words and rucksacks could take them, while others, such as Amiri Baraka, hoped to “clean out the world for virtue and love” by writing “poems that kill.” Our discussions of such raptures and ruptures will begin with an analysis of two seminal anthologies, both published in 1960-the 3rd edition of Understanding Poetry, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; and The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. Many of the poets listed in Allen’s anthology-Ginsberg, Snyder, Kerouac, Levertov, Olson, Creeley, Jones (Baraka), O’Hara, and Ashbery, to name a few-are now safely ensconced in the American literary canon; none were included in Understanding Poetry. As a way of better understanding this schism, we will apply a historicist approach to New Critical assumptions about the writer, the reader, and the “public” nature of poetry and compare those assumptions with the theory and practice propounded by the writers in New American Poetry. By the ‘60s, many of these poets were actively engaged in merging poetics with politics, as they acted out the affirmations of language, place, and civil rights within an often bewildering juxtaposition of “American” spaces stretching from Piute Creek to the moon and back and from Newark to Viet Nam. Readings to include works from the writers mentioned, as well as memoirs by Joyce Johnson, Diane di Prima, and Amiri Baraka. Grade to be determined by class discussion/facilitation, two medium-length papers and a final research project.

Prerequisite: For majors any 200-level English course; for non-majors, any 200-level or higher course in the study of literature in another language major.
Instructor: Andrews