Translingual Poetics

We are currently living in what Yasemin Yildiz
calls "linguascapes" of globalization: a
multilingual din amplified by mass migration, the
movements of refugees, and technologies like
machine translation. Uncommon combinations of
language are constantly emerging. Taking poets
such as Brandon Som, Cathy Park Hong, and Jos
Charles as models, we will incorporate heritage
languages, dead languages, invented languages, and
dialects in our poems; we will complicate the idea
of writing in English by remembering to ask whose
English we are writing in and why. By doing so, we
will consider whether multilingual poetics can
"attack the basis of language," as James Baldwin
says, while at the same time expanding its
expressive possibilities.

Prompts and open-ended assignments may include use
of words, grammatical structures, poetic forms,
literary/performative conventions, and/or writing
systems from other languages. Additional
assignments will ask students to create
speculative languages and the worlds in which they
are spoken. Final portfolios might consist of
individual poems that experiment with language in
multiple ways; they might also consist of loose
narratives, or a series that focuses on one or
more non-English languages.