Leila A Wilson

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 poems, publishing only a few anonymously in her lifetime. Many know her as a recluse, 'the woman in white' who rarely left her room in her family's home in Amherst, MA, though her poems prove her radicality, edginess, and performativity. Her poems' imagistic slants, lilting rhythms, and urgent breaks open possibilities that continue to inspire experimentation by poets and artists around the world. In this course we'll first ground our discussions by learning about Dickinson's life-her family, friendships, education, cultural influences, and political contexts-and we'll lean into her fascinations by slowly and closely reading her poems together. Then we'll spend time with some of her correspondence and see how her letters, along with her poems, enact and embody her queerness, feminism, environmentalism, and social critique. Digitized versions of her original fascicles, as well as some fragments and unbound sets, will allow us to examine her hand script and consider how her poems exist as physical art objects. Thrillingly, her poems invite and resist our knowing; they push back against easy summary and exert their own questions, satire, and sass. As we delve into her work, we'll also enjoy a diverse group of modern and contemporary poets and artists who have been sparked by Dickinson's poems, placing them in dialogue with Dickinson in our own expanded room.

An artist marks her journal with traces of food. An essayist compiles a glossary of terms for moving water. A novelist invents fragments of an outlaw's short life, while poets pay tribute to beech trees, miners, and railroads. They all document. They process their investigations through sketches and journal entries, interviews and testimonies, video clips and photographs, songs and maps. In this multi-genre course, students will research and write into one of their preoccupations. Through fieldwork, reading, critique, and revision, they will capture their discoveries. The final project will be a box that holds a creative work in dialogue with an archive of documents. Readings, references, and examples will draw from work by Lorine Niedecker, Terrence Hayes, Muriel Rukeyser, Robin Coste Lewis, Juliana Spahr, Paisley Rekdal, C.D. Wright, Robert Macfarlane, Claudia Rankine, Susan Howe, Mai Der Vang, Michael Ondaatje, and more.