Contemporary Poetry

In this course, we will take a close look at the work of five poets, three whose lives have spanned the American experience from the 1960s to the present (Peg Boyers, Carl Phillips, Frank Bidart) and two younger poets (Chelsea Woodard and Diane Mehta, both Union graduates). We'll take a look at the problem of the speaker in the poems (who may be the poet, more or less, or a mask, or a fiction, or some combination), which is also a way of asking questions about identity, history, and culture, as well as about freedom and restraint, the possibilities and limitations of language.