As we face multiple social and planetary crises, how might poetry transform our relation to place? In this workshop-based course, we will explore poetry’s attunements to place as both region and position—to the unceded lands and waters expropriated for the land-grant university and the multiple ways we inhabit this geography, shaped by settler colonialism, genocide, forced relocation, and other forms of racialized violence. What would it mean to write out of acknowledgement of place into accountability to place? Our writing practice will involve reading as writers, focusing on the work of poets Jericho Brown, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Marwa Helal, Lata Mani, Paisley Rekdal, Emily Riddle, and Vickie Vértiz who write in and out of place, critiquing anthropocentric, colonial, imperial, heteronormative, and nationalist logics of enclosure and belonging. We will develop our craft as poets, and learn the focus, vision, and resources that poetry provides.

For majors who declared in Fall 2023 or later, this course fulfills the following subject area requirement for the English major: Form, Media, Expression