3.0

credits

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This course examines twentieth-century and contemporary poetry in light of the cities where its writers lived, wrote, and shared their work. We’ll read poems by Hart Crane, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O’Hara, and others, considering how the confront the changing social and historical contours of American cities from New York to San Francisco. We’ll also look at some major city poems such as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Ed Roberson’s City Eclogue, and examine how the representational challenges of urban experience animated their explorations in form, rhythm, and genre. In a final unit, we’ll meet two contemporary Baltimore poets and make our own critical and imaginative forays into city writing.