Ungovernable: Poetry Against the State

UNGOVERNABLE SUBJECTS: POETRY AGAINST THE STATE. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," argues Audre Lorde, a provocation that still reverberates even now, inviting us to critique our relationship to power, the state, and the institutions that bind us to the two. In a time of persistent military occupation, settlerism, and other state sanctioned violence transpiring worldwide, what tools will free us from the powers that we are bound to? This course will look at the ways in which poetry can be one such tool of political interrogation and creative exercise. From Claudia Rankine's examination of the police state through the aggregate of racial microaggressions against her as a Black woman in Citizen: An American Lyric to Solmaz Sharif's dive into the dual vocabularies of violence and tenderness in the U.S. Defense Department's official dictionary, we will engage with and write in response to poetry and theories that expose the capacity of language to harm and liberate us.

Throughout this course, students will write responses to three "obstructions," writing prompts that invite students to think along the lines of political actions that disrupt business as usual - shutting down freeways, sit-ins, protesting outside of electoral events. This means writing poems that obstruct public life, drawing attention to the political issues that matter, through public recitation, distribution of poems in printed format, visual performance, etc. For the final project, students will attend an action or community organizing meeting related to a political issue of their choosing and produce a written response that answers the question: How can my body become a vehicle for change through poetry?