AI 11: Poetry Without Borders

This General Education course studies poetry as a cultural practice that requires and perversely challenges visual, linguistic, geographic, and aesthetic borders. Main topics are translation (poems crossing borders), emigration/exile (poets crossing borders), and poetry and other arts (poems joining with music, film, photography, and philosophy). Poems and prose by Charles Bernstein, Bei Dao, Joseph Brodsky, Paul Celan, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Howe, Yang Lian, Valzhyna Mort, Vladimir Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, and C. D. Wright, among others; theoretical texts, sound recordings, visual images, films, and poetry performances. Several poets and translators will come into our classroom for guest workshops, and there are readings and events outside of class for us as well.