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Jonathan Andrew Perez Poetic Justice: the Role of Poetry and Poets in Shaping Legal Rights [email protected]

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Jonathan Andrew Perez Poetic Justice: the Role of Poetry and Poets in Shaping Legal Rights Jonathanperezpoetry@Gmail.Com HUMS640 Instructor: Jonathan Andrew Perez Poetic Justice: The Role of Poetry and Poets in Shaping Legal Rights [email protected] SYLLABUS Overview This social poetics course considers three major areas of poetry and social practice: The Poetics of Witness, what does it mean to witness, either through war, the (over) policing of the state, or Diaspora belonging of Latinx writers in America. The Second Major area the Poetics of Revisioning in form and rights history. How do poetics come back to major moments in time and grapple with national division from Black Lives Matter to the troubled history of Jim Crow in America and consider the violence to the body as a community. The final area, “bringing it all back home” will be an assignment on the poetics of community and the collective. We will end on building out a podcast that addresses select poems and speaks to the community of listeners about its contemporary value in the hopes of beginning your amateur enthusiast careers as voices of the poetic forefront. In this course, we will read contemporary and early American social poetics writing of 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winning book Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, Terrance Hayes' Hip Logic, Kaveh Akbhar, Ilya Kaminsky, Danez Smith, Reginald Dwayne Betts poet-author of "Felon" against earlier Afro- American and Latinx writers in the Harlem Renaissance and California Chicano/a movement, such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Juan Herrera Felipe, The first Chicano U.S. Poet Laureate, and the New York Lower East Side writers loosely associated with the Puerto Rican poetry collective. We will dive into old order of the Harlem and Latinx Renaissance as well as the oldest group, reading Horace’s essay Ars Poetica and see how the “new contemporary" writers use the ideas of procedural justice and formally grapple with rhetorical sampling to comment both on social policy, and collectivity. Rhetorically, you will learn through the art of "sampling" including how social poetics and witness give new life to Sonnets, Erasure-poems, Acrostics, the Cut-Up poem, and Ekphrasis to speak from a point of view that is underrepresented and for vulnerable communities across the country. This course is not open to auditors. Grades: Class Participation: 10% Essay 1: 30% Essay 2: 40% Final Podcast Group Project: 20% 1 N.B. you are welcome to buy any, and all the books mentioned, a selected bibliography at the end. But I will always provide links to these poems and scanned copies of the secondary materials such as articles, and symposium clippings. Attendance Policy: You are strongly encouraged to attend every class online. Because we have such a limited time together, while there are no specific penalties for missing a class, I will require makeup assignments for class. The information in each class will be available by links including the poems, critical race theory, and social poetics essays, as well as multimedia podcasts and a short documentary film on “witnessing” in poetry and witnesses in legal theory. The real “meat and potatoes” will take place in our collaboration in class discussing the three major topic areas – the Poetic of Witness; The Poetics of Revisioning in Form and Rights History; and The Poetics of Community and Collective Action. The information and perspectives presented in each class will be very important. If you miss a class, you will be encouraged to find at least one “buddy” (who could be your partner on the Podcast) who can share notes with you and/or record the class if you should miss one. Assignments handed in late will be lowered by one letter grade per class session. Assignments: • Weekly “Discussion”: Before each class session you will be asked to write and submit (on the Discussion Boards on Moodle), and eventually podcasting on that weeks discrete topic of the poetics of witness, law and social poetics. The assignments are informal in application (unlike the essays which value analytical structure, writing, and thesis), rather we will value “depth” of thought, analysis, and surprising connections. There will be five informal discussions led jointly by students covering five the five weeks of class. Each will be led by the poems read in advance, and the topic we build upon. We will value drawing wide-social connections about the central place of poetics in shaping social consciousness, in times such as this pandemic, as well as the critical structural inequities that are changing communities. • Comparative Essays: there will be two comparative essays, with the second essay valued a bit higher. I will be hosting “office hours” online before the assignment to strategize, enhance, and facilitate your analytical framing. • Essay 1 topic: choose a topic covered by one of our poets “of the world” and that and that touches on the interplay of “art’s social presence” for a poetics and social practice essay. You can consider any of the topics we have discussed such (a) the poetics of witness, and social practice, (b) the poetics of revisioning, and what that means for revisionary poems that look back and build off history • Essay 2 topic: Choose a collective and speak to the class about your idea of the collective, how you define collectivity and where in the poetic oeuvre it speaks to class, power, race, gender, or community. Choose at least two poems and start to address a theory of the collective. Present on the social circumstances, the collective power and charging of 2 language, and how the poet converses with the collective. Consider defining the legal, social, and poetic collective, and the power of collectivity as an act, both in community organizing, changing the law and in the arts community transforming acting out of a solitary act of creation. Choose at least two or more from the poems read in class, or a collective discussed below and write about how the collaboration, conversation, and creativity forms a political practice and community. • Final Podcast Project: the final Week 5 (Class 10) project is a group project. In groups of two please choose two or more poems, and do a reading of the poem in a Podcast format followed by your analysis. Record your voices reading the poems and in pairs make an argument for its importance today. This interactive opportunity will expand our language to consider how the public remains central in poetic practice, how critical race theory and legal theory coincides with the central issue of “voice” in poetic practice. As a model, you will be encouraged look at the following podcasts: The Tracy K Smith Podcast, “The Slow Down”, VS: the Danez Smith and Franny Choi poetry foundation podcast, Justice in America, Poet Kind, and other selections. Week-By-Week Overview with Assignments Note that all the assignments are due on the class dates under which they are listed, except for the first class. The weekly assignments may change to a podcast format. FIRST THEME Poetics of Witness Poetics and Social Practice is a literary, critical and pedagogical undertaking devoted to the situation of poetry and prose in the contemporary world. The area recognizes that “art’s social presence” as coined by the poet Adrienne Rich, is vital to contemporary culture, traversing the fields of legal, social, aesthetic, political and activist thought: it reconfigures these fields according to the designs of the imagination. Week 1 Class 1 Introductions and Ice-breaker Exercise Overarching discussion topic: witness: what is a witness? What power does a witness to history hold, how is a witness central in a legal case, and types of witnessing occur in evidence. What evidentiary weight does a witness hold in legal analysis as hearsay evidence, the doctrine of res ipsa loquitor. What if we consider that the law itself is subject to change, like poetry and language. To read before class: Article by Carolyn Forche on the Poetry of Witness: 3 https://www.folger.edu/events/poetry-of-witness Handout in Class: The Poetry of Diaspora and witness as place-in-America Diaspora, and America, Kaveh Akbar’s “The Palace” https://www.newyorker.com/books/poems/kaveh-akbar-the-palace **For Next Class Watch the Documentary: The Poetry of Witness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL9YgCbcryw Ilya Kaminsky’s Gunshot, from the Deaf Republic: the poetics of deafness, and nationhood https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/deaf-republic (Poetry of Witness during Wartime) The Poetry of Witness as First Poet Laureate of Chicano Heritage: Juan Felipe Herrera https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70252/juan-felipe-herrera-101 Read: “Exiles” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58270/exiles-56d23c7eba08b Extra credit: Latinx U.S. Poetry https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/144542/us-latinx-voices-in-poetry Class 2 Witness Continued- discussing the form and value of witnessing Handout to read in class Lucille Clifton’s Come Celebrate with Me RR Lyrae: Matter by Van Clief Stefanon https://poets.org/poem/rr-lyrae-matter Howl, by Allen Ginsberg: “I saw the best of my generation…” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl **For Next Class The Golden Shovel Poem by Terrance Hayes The Golden Shovel on Poets.org Jericho Brown’s Duplex as an Invented Poetic Form Read: “Duplex” from the Tradition https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152729/duplex Gwendolyn Brooks’ epic revision We Real Cool/ Selections of “The Anniad” What is the epic poem? What is a mock epic? Why would you mock an epic? What does the revisioning of the Epic do to the Poetry of Witness https://poets.org/glossary/epic 4 Week 2 SECOND THEME The Poetics of Revisioning- Form and History The Poetics of Revisioning includes such invented forms as Pulitzer-prize wining poet Jericho Brown’s Duplex, and Terrance Hayes “Hip Logic” Golden Shovel.
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