Obsessed City, Relentless Day: A Generative Seminar at Poetry Society of America
An exploration of contemporary poetry that draws our attention to the city—a site continuously transformed by industry, the workday, commerce,
various architectures, economies, academic institutions, and histories of war and politics. Students will read authors including Harryette Mullen,
Sesshu Foster, Renee Gladman, Stacy Szymaszek, Maged Zaher, Mirene Arsanios, Karen Brodine, and C.P. Cavafy, and consider how the act of writing intervenes
in urban life and vice versa. What “acts of location,” do these authors perform in their writing? How can documents of “beautiful and/or ugly sites” reveal a writerly self? Students will encounter authors whose work interleaves a personal account of writing with sensorial and philosophical accounts of the city—authors who pursue a literary–materialist reckoning of urban life relentlessly. In this seminar, students will attempt a similar pursuit.
Participants can expect to read, discuss, and write in roughly equal proportions.