Poetry & The Public considers the motivation, intent, reception, and ethics of poetic response to major political events of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Through a wide survey of poems, we will investigate not only the contextual motivation for poets responding to political issues but interrogate the formal and performative means by which they present their work to the public. Poems will be read within a wider history of social movements and civil liberties; and touch upon major historical events such as the AIDS crisis, Black liberation struggles, movements for feminist and 2SLGBTQIA+ rights, ecological and climate-change concerns, and current calls for prison abolition. We will touch upon poetic “schools” or “styles,” including the Poetics of Witness, persona poetry, the Black Arts Movement, and the Kootenay School of Writing. This course explores how BIPOC literature has intersected with social problems and activist movements, creating spaces for readers to reflect on their own lived experiences. Students will expand their creative thinking, critical reading and scholarly writing skills through multi-modal assignments that offer connections to current issues and community knowledge. Aspects of culture attributed to “the Vikings”—their assumed independence, courage, resourcefulness, and tenacity in the face of adversity, as well as the occult characteristics of their cosmology—have, for better and worse, inspired modern artists, writers, composers, intellectuals, explorers and even political leaders, and persist in present day literature, art, music, sport and popular culture as well. Why and how do elements of historic Viking culture continue to evoke traditions and characteristics popularly attributed to “the Vikings”? What are some implications of “Viking-ness” for those people in the post-Viking Age past and/or present who we may regard—or may regard themselves—as the “cultural descendants” of the Vikings? In this seminar, participants will study selected cultural artifacts of the “post-Viking Age,” along with recent multidisciplinary research, to observe how various “post-Viking Age” cultures and subcultures have selectively appropriated elements of the “Viking” past.
Poetry & The Public considers the motivation, intent, reception, and ethics of poetic response to major political events of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Through a wide survey of poems, we will investigate not only the contextual motivation for poets responding to political issues but interrogate the formal and performative means by which they present their work to the public. Poems will be read within a wider history of social movements and civil liberties; and touch upon major historical events such as the AIDS crisis, Black liberation struggles, movements for feminist and 2SLGBTQIA+ rights, ecological and climate-change concerns, and current calls for prison abolition. We will touch upon poetic “schools” or “styles,” including the Poetics of Witness, persona poetry, the Black Arts Movement, and the Kootenay School of Writing. This course explores how BIPOC literature has intersected with social problems and activist movements, creating spaces for readers to reflect on their own lived experiences. Students will expand their creative thinking, critical reading and scholarly writing skills through multi-modal assignments that offer connections to current issues and community knowledge. Aspects of culture attributed to “the Vikings”—their assumed independence, courage, resourcefulness, and tenacity in the face of adversity, as well as the occult characteristics of their cosmology—have, for better and worse, inspired modern artists, writers, composers, intellectuals, explorers and even political leaders, and persist in present day literature, art, music, sport and popular culture as well. Why and how do elements of historic Viking culture continue to evoke traditions and characteristics popularly attributed to “the Vikings”? What are some implications of “Viking-ness” for those people in the post-Viking Age past and/or present who we may regard—or may regard themselves—as the “cultural descendants” of the Vikings? In this seminar, participants will study selected cultural artifacts of the “post-Viking Age,” along with recent multidisciplinary research, to observe how various “post-Viking Age” cultures and subcultures have selectively appropriated elements of the “Viking” past.
