Contemporary Poetry

Overview

his module examines a broad range of contemporary poetry guided by three overlapping module themes: community; conflict; and climate. In doing so, it asks three questions: (1) Can a poem register contemporary crises – of community, conflict and climate – while also offering modes of engagement that challenge us to re-evaluate our response to our shared conditions? (2) How can poetic forms and styles intervene in our contemporary moment to speak back to it with renewed insight or feeling? (3) In what ways does contemporary poetry’s representation of our environment help us negotiate the past, understand our present, and perhaps re-imagine the future?



The module has a three-part structure. The first considers the ways contemporary poetry represents and in turn shape debates about community, in particular how gender, sexuality and race inform identity, and how poetry approaches the possibility of communal belonging across boundaries of difference. The second analyses poetic treatments of conflict, analysing the poetic strategies used to depict conflicts prompted by contemporary crises, including those of immigration and race. The final section of the module explores poetic representations of climate, asking what contemporary poetry has to say about the non-human world, environmental interconnectedness, extinction, and a communal future.

Learning Objectives

Having completed this module, students will have enhanced their understanding of community, conflict and climate in the contemporary period. They will be able to identify and analyse a variety of poetic responses to these subjects. They will have developed the ability to evaluate the significance of political and social contexts in the interpretation of contemporary poetry. They will have developed the special ability to read and analyse individual volumes of poetry and thus read poems in the context and structure of a whole work.

Skills

Students will develop the ability to read and critically analyse of a number of forms of literary texts, including, long poems, epistolary verse, short-line forms and collage poetry. They will enhance their skills in comparative analysis, and in relating set texts to a variety of approaches to and interpretations of the contemporary period. They will hone their ability to research historical and cultural material, and to bring relevant contextual information to bear on their critical writing. From their acquired knowledge of critical reflections on the contemporary period, they will develop a critical discernment in relation to competing arguments and interpretations of contemporary poetry.

Assessment

none