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In her essay „Poetry is not a Luxury“ Audre Lorde describes the significance of poetic writing within the discourse of Black Feminism as the “revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight” (Sister Outsider, p.37). This quote gives direction to the aim of this class in two ways: for one, Lorde points out that for Black women poetic writing is not just a mere artistic form of expression but also a platform to explore and share their realities. For another, she hints at limitations posed by generic conventions that — derived from a Western literary tradition — render poetic writing a highly stylized literary art form to such an extent that it threatens to sever the link between poetic expression and the writer’s lived reality. In this class, we will therefore not not only look at the specific aesthetics and literary merit of poetry written by Black Feminist writers, but we will also explore these texts’ political scope and activist endeavor in the specific context of their time. We will explore how Black Feminist poets make use of generic conventions and boundaries as they challenge, expand, and transgress them and work towards possibilities to communicate their multi-faceted life realities at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and beyond. While the focus of this seminar is on texts written in mid or late 20th century (e.g. Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, and Audre Lorde), we will also engage with earlier as well as more contemporary texts and look at different modes of poetic performance.
Seminar texts (both poems and secondary readings) will be provided as a reader in the beginning of the seminar, visual and audio material will be provided via Moodle |
