English 165 - Winter, 2021

Topics in Poetry

Topic: Environmental Poetry

 

Class Information

Instructor: Ronda, Margaret
CRN: 44513
Time: MWF 11:00-11:50
Location: Remote Instruction
GE Areas: Writing Experience

Description

In this course, we will examine twentieth-century North American poetry in the context of planetary environmental crisis. We'll consider how poetic forms, genres, and themes reflect, and reflect on, on material changes to the natural environment at various scales. We will explore the various discourses of cultivation, cohabitation, wilderness, network, pollution, waste, compost, recycling, apocalypse, extinction, and environmental racism that poets take up and rework. We will also read some key works of ecocriticism alongside our primary poetic texts.

Texts

Habitat Threshold, Craig Santos Perez
Doomstead Days, Brian Teare
Corpse Whale, DG Okpik
The Ecopoetry Anthology, Ann Fisher-Wirth
Black Nature, Camille Dungy