Necrosociality in Amer. Poetry

San Francisco anarchist poet Jack Spicer once
wrote, in one of his letters to the then

already deceased Spanish poet and playwright
Federico García Lorca, "this is how we dead men
write to each other." Spicer famously conceived of
the speaker of a poem as being already
dead-something that enabled him to fashion a kind
of queer necro-underground in his work of the
1950s and early 1960s. In this he was
participating in a conception of poetry, poets and
poem-making that though certainly not-exclusively
American in any sense has been present in the work
of a wide range of North American poetries of the
last one hundred and sixty years. This conception
points to an understanding of literature itself as
a "necrosocial" dimension, a social space of
experience that is often a very intense one for
the writer and reader while remaining
simultaneously an impossible one in the sense that
socializing with the dead would be, from most
perspectives, empirically impossible. This
understanding has proved important in different
way for North American poets engaging in various
Feminist, Indigenous, African American and
generally counter-cultural necro-undergrounds of
their own makings and desires. This course will
feature the work of poets such as Walt Whitman,
Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Notley,
Dorothea Lasky, CAConrad, Nathaniel Mackey,
Dolores Dorantes, Fred Moten, Cedar Sigo, Hoa
Nguyen, and others. Students will engage with this
work and related ideas in class discussions, and
critical and creative writing assignments.