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ENGL 384: Women and Poetry in America 1960 to the Present
According to the poet and critic, Eavan Boland, between the terms ‘woman’ and ‘poet’ there exists a ‘flawed space’. In its exploration of that space, the course begins with a major figure in American literature of the last five decades, Adrienne Rich, and closes with the publication of Sharon Olds’ Selected Poems in 2005. Rich’s influential (and problematic) call to women poets to ‘write directly and overtly as a woman…to take women’s existence seriously as theme and source for art’, a stance which she argued would close the gap between woman and poet, will overarch discussion of the transitions in Rich’s own oeuvre before tracing her influence on those poets writing in her wake.
In addition to a formal essay, students will have the option either to respond creatively to poems encountered on the course (by writing a sequence of 4 poems) or to identify a theme (e.g. mothers/daughters, the female erotic, the body) and write the introduction to an anthology of their own devising.
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