Comment on the poems of Juliana Spahr, Evelyn Reilly and/or Brenda Hillman having in mind one (or both) of these topics 1. modes and forms of relation with the atmosphere present in them; types of atmospheres; ideas about air and relations between humans and other organisms and inorganic agents in air that the poems work with 2.  practices of activism, or ecopoetics as activist practice.

  Choose either (or both), 1.  "Languages of description may need to change under pressure of new angles of inquiry into how complex interrelationships make sense. (And vice versa as well.)" Comment on this sentence of "What is Experimental Poetry & Why do We Need It?" by Joan Retallack, in light of either Claudia Rankine's or Evelyn Reilly's poems 1. Listen to the beginning of this video where Evelyn Reilly reads from  Styrofoam . In what ways does Evelyn Reilly's online performance - or, aleternatively, Claudia Rankine's "situation videos" (see previous post) - help you understand these poems better?

 Choose one and try out your ideas in writing: 1. Do some research on mythopoetics and comment on how Chabitnoy and/or Joy Harjo weave myth into their contemporary poetry and what it does for the undecidability of water and environmental or social justice.  2. Close-read any of the following poems by Chabitnoy: "Anatomy of a Wave", "Kingugturningaitua", or "Red Bed Fatale".  2. Watch the following  situation video ( by the poet Claudia Rankine and her partner, the documentary photographer John Lucas), whose text is actually taken from Citizen (though not from any of your excerpts). Considering that two of Rankine's poetry collections are subtitled "An American Lyric", do you see rifts and evolutions here in the concept of "lyric" that tie in with V. Jackson's overview in her academic entry for "Lyric"?

 Comment on whichever you like (or on something besides :)) 1. Provide an analysis / interpretation of Marianne Moore's "A Jelly-Fish" or Adrienne Rich's "Shattered Head". 2. Consider this short poem by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: CORAL It came and went Asking each thing What their name meant or, in Portuguese: "Ia e vinha / Perguntando a cada coisa / Que nome tinha" and relate the lines with either "A Grave" (by Moore) or "The Sea is History" (by Walcott) and their efforts towards looking at names, actions and beings through different angles/directions. 3. In which ways do these poems explore marginal / submerged forms (think of the "awakened dead2 in Adrienne Rich's essay) and how can there relate to a more ecologic deployment of language (or of environmental justice)?

Comment on one or more prompts (on "fish(y)" poems by Moore, Bishop, Oliver, Harjo, and Limón)  (illustration by a student of Ms. Caitlyn Trimble, that your teacher found in the infamous platform X:  https://x.com/MsTrimbleEng/status/991844239607648256/photo/4 ) Do you fish? Do you keep / cook and eat / talk to fish? What do you know about (old and contemporary) fish? How do these fish swim around from one text to the other? Could the relationship to these fish be determined by the authors’ gender? Can you think about a music and a work of visual art relating to fish / the ocean / water? How do they help you to read these texts?

  1. Sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself. (..). That is very much the image of the rhizome, prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation. Because the thought of errantry is also the thought of what is relative, the thing relayed as well as the thing related. The thought of errantry is a poetics…The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation  (Edouard Glissan, Poetics of Relation , trans. Betsy Wing, 1997 [1990],   18) Both Sylvia Plath's "The Elm" and Adrienne Rich's "Shattered Head" are complicated poems. They seem to aim at reaching "an-other's language", or speaking "through the other", but they also preclude the possibility of easy/direct relations. In what ways does the use of language in these poems thwart identitary representation? What effort do they place on the reader? 2.   How can Steve Mentz's theoretical approach to the O...