World Poems

This is a course on 20th- and 21st-century world poetry—poetry in dialogue with literature from other cultures, or poetry that reflects on experiences of coming into contact with other cultures. Our main focus will be long poems and poem cycles written in the wake of imperial incursions and diasporic resettlements. Some of these poems have engrossing plots and rounded characters, such as a novel in verse about yuppies in San Francisco. Others complicate narrative development in favor of more cyclical or disjunctive effects, such as a postcolonial epic inspired by the Odyssey, or a poem cycle that fractures and transforms legal language on the Zong, an 18th-century slave ship whose captain tried to maximize his company’s profits by throwing 150 Africans overboard to their deaths. We will examine the rich array of lyric, narrative, and dramatic forms that poets have developed over the last century to evoke the many kinds of crossings—cultural and textual, personal and communal, voluntary and forced—peculiar to our globalizing age. We will read long poems by Aimé Césaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Michael Ondaatje, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Vikram Seth, with additional short poems, essays, and excerpts by St.-John Perse, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Édouard Glissant, Louise Glück, Patrick Chamoiseau, Khal Torabully, and Immanuel Mifsud.