WINTER QUARTER
2022
“Site of Struggle” Poetry, History, and Social Justice HUM 395-0-21 / ENGLISH 306-0-20 W 2:00-4:50 pm Natasha Trethewey
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination. —Toni Morrison
Darryl Cowherd, Stop White Police from Killing Us – St. Louis, MO, c. 1966-67. Gelatin Silver Print.Image: 15 x 19 in., mat: 20 x 24 ¼ in., paper 16 x 20 in. © Darryl Cowherd. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Responding to the question posed by the A Site of Struggle exhibition at the Block Museum— How has art been used to protest, process, mourn, and memorialize anti-black violence within the United States?—this course will focus on the reading and writing of poems that engage this difficult history. We will consider the function of poetry to document, bear witness, and to effect what Seamus Heaney called “the redress of poetry.” Along with reading poems that take up the subject, we will read several essays to undergird our discussion of the ethics of representation, positionality, and what it means to write about violence and trauma. In all of this, we will focus on the craft of writing poetry—metaphor, image, musicality, voice, etc.—with a focus on ekphrasis and intertextuality which will engage students in responding both to the works of art in the exhibition and the poems we will read in the course.
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