Do you secretly dream of giving a poetry reading on a crowded city bus? Would you like to conduct a poetry workshop with grade-schoolers, senior citizens, or the kids on your hall? Have you always wanted to interview family, friends and strangers about their favorite poems? If so, this course exploring poetrys role in the public sphere is for you. Divided into topics including Poetry & Performance, Poetry & Therapy, and Poetry & Community, this literature course examines how poetry affects and is affected by social context. Coursework includes comprehensive analysis of a range of poems, anthologies and essays concerned with typically nonacademic applications of poetry, as well as an outside final project and presentation. (You need not be a poet or extrovert to succeed in Out Poetry!) Tentative texts include: Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness edited by Carolyn Forche, June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint edited by Lauren Muller, and From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002 edited by Ishmael Reed.
