English 285sa. South Asian Poetry

Instructor: Vidyan Ravinthiran
TBD | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

Originally, this course centered poets resident in, and writing from, post-Independence India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It will now also examine South Asian-American and British-South Asian writers. In terms of poets living in the Global South, it will concentrate on those who break with the wannabe-colonial, archaically emulous stuff which came before them—with the aid of European modernism, and US poetry’s turn to open forms and a streetwise vernacular. Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Arun Kolatkar, Eunice de Souza—these are poets whose politics is inextricable from the aesthetic richness of their work. Moving to the US and UK, we’ll ask if a lineage can be mapped out, connecting practitioners of lyric—Sujata Bhatt, Agha Shahid Ali, and A.K. Ramanujan are examples—with the explicitly racialized, often post-lyric, experimental work (encompassing prose poetry) of 21st century authors like Bhanu Kapil, Medha Singh and Divya Victor.