Fall 2008 Courses

English 394-01: Asian American Poetics (Naca)

M/W/F 10:50-11:50am OLRI 300

In their poems, Asian American poets theorize the project of America, as much as what it means to be Asian: to live under the weight of distinctive racial tensions and violence, to negotiate diasporic spaces, and to find communities that provide cultural legibility. As soothsayers, Asian American poets delve to the darkest and most lush terrains and push the boundaries of feeling in subject matter. As craftsmen, they spare no aesthetic recourse to cull emotion, even and especially through silence. Their distinguished history of establishing workshop-like writing circles has fostered some charismatic figures to strive and break into the mainstream of academic verse. Many are purveyors of avant-garde poetics, whose experimental poetry is integral to their program of radical assimilation.

We take a historical approach to Asian American poetry, reading work from the nineteenth century to the present. This includes poetries of internment, post-civil rights era, and the avant-garde from modernism to the contemporary. We also take a poet's approach, reading poems from the inside out: tone, syllable, line, sentence, stanza. We untangle spirit, the utter, utter, as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes. We practice sensitive articulation as a form of poetic reciprocity in discussion and in writing. To do this, we write in multiple genres: prose, poetry, fragments, to name a few. We engage our political sensibilities in a term anthology project, in which students practice the role of poet-pedagogue. Assignments include: regular study questions, short poetics papers, poems, and term project. Individual poets of interest will include: José Garcia Villa, Mei Mei Berssengbrugge, Linh Dinh, John Yau, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

*First day attendance required.*

Fall 2008 Course Listings