Poetry As Social Action is designed as an arts-based approach to poetry, poetic practices and social action. This course will explore poetry within an expanded field of media, perspectives and themes that orbit notions of networks, community, sociability and activism. This course is intended to consider poetic practices beyond the page or screen however utilizing both as resource and medium in the act of making.
This course approaches poetry as an expansive, critical, outwardly and often incognito form of activism or political form of making; explicitly focused on an arts-based approach to poetry and poetic practice.
Lectures, readings, viewings, listenings and guests provided by the course will claim poetry as a resource for, and equal art to, sculpture, installation, architecture, performance, dance, lecture, music, film and sound. In particular, given the formative, even sculptural, role of poetry in many radical social and nation-building movements, the course materials and invited guests will emphasize contributions of artist-poets to anti-racist, feminist, queer, as well as decolonizing struggles and initiatives.