Spots available: English 192V A Documentary Poetics of P(l)(e)ace with L. Lamar Wilson

This Autumn, L. Lamar Wilson is the Mohr Visiting Poet and CW is offering a seminar to undergraduates, English 192V. In this seminar, you'll explore how writers' sense of place intersects with their narrative, lyrical, and syntactical choices as they envision peace during times of war and social unrest. Full course description below; syllabus available on ExploreCourses.

*Spots are available! First come, first serve. Course enrollment to close on TUES, OCT 1. If interested, email dhuligan [at] stanford.edu (Danielle Huliganga).

English 192V A Documentary Poetics of P(l)(e)ace

Autumn | Tues 3:00-5:50pm | 5 units

Prerequisite: introductory poetry course 

Satisfies: intermediate/advanced poetry requirement for CW minor

Processing this staggering moment’s ubiquity of human conflict at home and abroad, we will explore how writers’ sense of place intersects with their narrative, lyrical, and syntactical choices as they envision peace during unyielding war and social unrest. We will ground ourselves with formative texts by Eleazer (more here), Lucy Terry Prince, Samuel Occom, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Yellow Bird, Walt Whitman, Zitkála-Šá, Jose Martí, Lucien B. Watkins, T.S. Eliot, H.D., Marianne Moore, Claude McKay, Pablo Neruda, Melvin B. Tolson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Xuân Dięu, Seamus Heaney, Mahmoud Darwish, Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forché, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and others, created, respectively, in the wake of America’s pre- and early-colonial wars with indigenous, French, and British peoples; its first civil war and involvement in postbellum conflicts in Cuba and Mexico; the twentieth century’s world wars in Eurasia and conflicts in Vietnam, Ireland, and the Middle East; and the inextricably tied wars on “poverty” and “drugs” at the fin de siècle and end of the last millennium, whose failures have shrouded this century’s digital disinformation divide and culture wars. Then, we will examine the ecopoetics in two traditions that have shaped this century’s art: Forché’s “poetics of witness” and the emerging school known as “documentary poetics.” We will select five recent collections and historicize their lineages, ecopoetics, and wordcraft as we refine our own. 

L. Lamar Wilson is the 2024-25 Mohr Visiting Poet. He is the author of Sacrilegion (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), a Thom Gunn Award finalist, and associate producer of The Changing Same (PBS/POV Shorts, 2019). He’s published widely, including in This Is the Honey (Hatchette, 2024), Bigger than Bravery (Lookout Books, 2022), the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Times, Oxford American, and Poetry. Wilson, an Affrilachian Poet, has received fellowships from the Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, Hurston-Wright, and Ragdale foundations. He teaches creative writing, African American poetics, and film and gender studies at Florida State University and Mississippi University for Women.