Spring 2008 Courses

English 294-01: Poetry of Environment (Krier)

M/W/F 10:50-11:50am, Carnegie 304

Language does not impose order on a chaotic universe but reflects its own wildness back. – Gary Snyder

In this course we'll read a wide array of poetry, along with selected creation myths, cosmologies, and essays, to consider poets' sense of what Gary Snyder famously called "Earth Household." What is an environment in the first place? What environs us? How do we find a dynamic and just principle of dwelling? How do poets evoke the vitality of sensory experience within elemental environments? How does a specific natural environment arouse strong emotions and attachments? How do people in today's environmental movements use poetry? Can poetry about environments teach specific guidelines for living? What are ecopoetry and ecocriticism, and how are they different from nature poetry? What do poets mean when they say that language itself becomes an environment, or when they say that language is wild? Are broad scientific virtues of exactitude of observation, and a contemplative spirit, also virtues in environment poetry? How can studying poetry fuel or refine thinking about environmental justice?

We'll read from poets and cosmologists like Lao Tzu, T'ao Ch'ien, Wang Wei, Hesiod, Virgil, Thomas Traherne, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Gary Snyder, Dylan Thomas, Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, A. R. Ammons, Susan Stewart, Ted Hughes, Kenneth Rexroth, Alice Oswald, Louise Erdrich, Mary Oliver, Jorie Graham. To focus our thinking we'll draw occasionally on prose by thinkers like Dogen, Emerson, Dorothy Wordsworth, Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, Gary Snyder, Joanna Macy.

This course is open to all students, with or without previous experience of poetry, with or without expertise in environmental issues. We'll learn how to read poetry, and discover what questions to ask of poetry of the natural world. We'll investigate the current state of journals and magazines that use the arts to develop a vision of environment, and we'll investigate initiatives in environmentalism and the arts in our own region. There will be a mid-term and a final; students will write essays and journal entries.

*Cross-listed with ENVI 294-01* This course fulfills the College's new writing requirement (the "W" requirement).

Spring 2008 Course Listings