20th-Century African American Poetry
Class Information
Instructor: Gray, Erin
CRN: 56635
Time: TR 1:40-3:00pm
Location: 1150 Hart
GE Areas: American Cultures, Governance, and History Writing Experience
Description
This course serves as an introduction to poetry by Black writers living and working in the United States in the twentieth century. Beginning with the musical forms that have influenced Black poetry and poetics, we explore the relationship between oral folk traditions and modernist aesthetics from the New Negro movements of the early twentieth century to the experiments of the post-Black Arts generation. Along the way, we cover sorrow songs, the blues, lyric verse, vernacular, modernism, jazz, New American Poetry, the Black Aesthetic, the emergence of hip hop, and LANGUAGE poetry. Throughout the course, we read works by contemporary poets alongside their poetic ancestors, focusing on the intergenerational exchange of form, memory, sound, and vision. Central to our study are the social and political conditions of African American poetic invention. We also concentrate on the connection of poetry to other aesthetic modes and forms of life: visual culture, performance practices, conceptual art, and underground publishing communities.
Kevin Young?s African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song will serve as the poetry anthology for the course. Poems will be supplemented by (read alongside) music and visual art as well as intensive readings in history, philosophy, and literary criticism by such authors as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Nathaniel Mackey, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Carolyn Rodger, and Larry Neal.