- CC 325 FX - Poetry of Social Justice
- 3 or 4 Credits
TR 2:50-4:05 pm - Professor Childress
(Cross-listed with ENGL 390BX & ENGL 590BX)
“Poets,” says Percy Bysshe Shelley, “are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.” W.H. Auden writes, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Adrienne Rich tells us that poetry can “remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future…founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom….”
Is Auden correct? Or Shelley, or Rich?
In this course we’ll investigate less what poetry is but what it does, especially in the public sphere, and why one inquiry may bend us back around to the other. We’ll examine what great poets—Shelley, Auden, and Rich among them—can teach us about the ways poets wrestle with social activism and convictions in their work, and how still others have found themselves in the middle of war and other brute circumstances where they can do little else but (bear) witness: these are “social” poems—not “personal,” not “political”—a new category, a place of resistance and struggle, of protest, poems that work to establish, as Carolyn Forché asserts, “claims against the political order in the name of justice.”
Requirements include weekly readings of both poems and articles or essays, a reader’s journal, active participation in class discussion, a 10-15 minute class presentation, two 5-page papers, and one 10-page research paper on a subject of the student’s choice.
