At the bottom of the page, you can find the course map to Indigenous, Immigrant, and Multilingual American Poetry.
I’ve had the good fortune to work for years with Prof. Al Filreis and an amazingly talented group of people around the world on the Coursera free online course “Modern and Contemporary American Poetry.”
Learn more about the course and how to enroll.
Every fall, from September to the end of November, we have the intensive mode of the course, trekking through American poetry, collaboratively close reading the work of poets from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, to modernists like H.D. and William Carlos Williams, to the Beats like Allen Ginsberg and the New York School with poets such as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, onto newer, recent contemporary work by poets challenging the medium such as Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Tracie Morris, Rae Armantrout, Christian Bök, and Erica Baum.
It’s a great ride — each week introduces a new theme or group of poets, and Al and the T.A.’s such as myself have weekly online office hours during this intensive mode span. Also, we manage to pull off, thanks to a deft and knowledgeable technical team, a weekly live online broadcast in which we field called-in questions, twitter questions, facebook questions . . . sometimes with surprise guests.
Here is a sampling:
and you need to watch this amazing Tracie Morris video which we discuss in class:
Al is also constantly adding new content, such as this “ModPoMinute #32: On John Wieners’s ‘Two Years Later,’ with Jason Zuzga”
Learn more about the course and how to enroll.
In the off-season, from December through August, we offer “SloPo” courses — I’ve had the good fortune to teach a number of them — one on Frank O’Hara, and another on James Schuyler and Eileen Myles, another on Women of the New York School — proto-New-York-Schooler Mina Loy, Alice Notley, and Barbara Guest (we read the entirety of Notley’s epic The Descent of Alette!). If you’re already registered with Coursera and signed-up for ModPo, the links in this paragraph will take you to those classes and their materials. Here are a few video discussions made with students of mine close reading some of the O’Hara poems and the Schuyler poems:
On Frank O’Hara’s “Autobiographia Literaria”
On Frank O’Hara’s “Music” (filmed in Midtown Manhattan)
On Part One of Frank O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings”
On James Schuyler’s “Today”
On James Schuyler’s “Freely Espousing”
On James Schuyler’s “February”
Learn more about the course and how to enroll.
In Spring of 2020, I taught a course on Indigenous, Immigrant, and Multilingual American Poetry, in which we initially read about Jerome Rothenberg’s practice of ethnopoetics, reading from his anthology of American Indian poetry, primarily oral performance in translation, Shaking the Pumpkin. Beginning with teaching that class, I’m in the process of developing a number of topic-specific resource pages, basically each a deep dive into a week of the class, including and going beyond the content that we were limited to by time. Those sites are, in part, now available, with those not-yet-linked-to in progress, with more to be completed until each page is fully fleshed out and done. Links to these resource pages are here below:
Indigenous, Immigrant, & Multilingual American Poetry-A ModPoSloPo Course 2/8/2020 – 4/4/2020
Map to the Course Resources on this Site
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- Access-the-Course-Map for Students New to Coursera online and SloPo Courses
- Course Overview with Sample Poems and Sample Discussion Thread
- The Library
- Week One and Two Materials: Ethnopoetics & Shaking the Pumpkin
- Jerome Rothenberg Assemblage of Materials: From Ethnopoetics to his own poetry and his work on A Big Jewish Book — texts, audio, video.
- The Q&A with Jerome Rothenberg
- Week Three Materials: Contemporary American Indian Poetry
- Week Four Materials: Pacific Islander Poetry
- Week Four Materials: Contemporary Caribbean Anglophone Poetry
- Week Five Materials: Contemporary African-American Poetry
- Week Six Materials: Contemporary Latinx-American Poetry and Performance
- Week Seven Materials: Contemporary Asian-American Poetry
- Week Eight Materials: The Ghazal, Contemporary Middle-Eastern and South-Asian Poetry
- RETURN TO COURSERA COURSE SITE PAGE