Voices from four cultures: the poetry of Kei Miller, Denise Riley, Terrance Hayes and Juana Adcock

Aims

This course aims to:

• introduce and alert you to the variety of contemporary poetry
• engage you with the diverse complexities of the set texts
• explore the fierce and engaged relevance to contemporary life that poetry can achieve

Course content

With both metrical and free verse to draw from, and our present panoply of digital data and connections seeming to make everything available, contemporary poets have an embarrassment of choice — but their responses are often deeply grounded, and as rationally argumentative as they are emotionally vibrant.

For Kei Miller, all too aware of Jamaica’s often violent, sectarian, and deeply troubled history since Independence, the unmappability of perceptions shaped by faith and the abyss between the understandings of faith and science spurred him to imagine conversations between them, interspersed with other meditations on his homeland. 

For Denise Riley, ordinary adult life was abruptly riven by the sudden death of her grown child, a bereavement bringing into question both her own maternity and her identity as a poet and philosopher yet in time generating a great elegy that informs a deeply elegiac collection. 

For Terrance Hayes, aware long before the killing of George Floyd of what his African-American brethren and sistren constantly endured in the US, the discipline of blank sonnets offered a way of marshalling and deploying both rage and compassion, hope and despair, resentment and understanding. 

And for Juana Adcock the tensions between Christian, Freudian, and Meso-American understandings and symbolisms of the snake offered a starting-point for a startling collection of poems exploring and expressing modern female multicultural identity.

Working though cultural confusions, enduring loss and gain, confronting personal and ethnic identities, exploring oppressions and liberties, all these poets bring poetic disciplines of one or another kind to bear on excesses of emotion and thought, striving to grasp and find coherence in a world that becomes ever more complex and chaotic, and all achieve triumphant work that is either book-length or centred on a long poem.

What to expect on this course
Each session will begin with a mini-lecture and PowerPoint presentation, lasting 30–45 mins, and subsequently open to question and answer, and contributions by all. Questions and responses will be welcome throughout and need not concern only the poems in hand.

Course sessions

1. Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion: Within Rastafarian theology and culture, we are in ‘Babylon’ and wish to wind up in ‘Zion’, but how we can get there is not a matter of science but of understanding and conduct ; cartographers, however, find this unreasonable and frustrating.

    

2. Denise Riley, Say Something Back: The death of a child is always an agony to parents ; the sudden death of an adult child an incomprehensible evacuation of meaning. We say we write elegies for the dead, but they are in truth for, as by, the mourners.

    

3. Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin: Emancipation was a victory, but not an end. The Civil Rights Movement was a victory, but not an end. Racial prejudice rolls on, deeply wrought within US culture and society. Black Lives Matter, and in Hayes’s work they utter.

    

4. Juana Adcock, Split: … between countries and cultures, families and friends, genders and orientations, selves and others, what do we have in the end but the words that sustain us?

    

5. Plenary: Rage, Sorrow, and Understanding: An open discussion of all four volumes, exploring similarities, contrasts, and achievements under various discipline, despite everything.

Learning outcome

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:

• sample and explore the variety of contemporary poetry 
• engage deeply with the set texts
• confront the relevance of poetry to contemporary life

Required reading

Miller, Kei, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014) ISBN 978-1-84777267-1

Riley, Denise, Say Something Back (London: Picador, 2016) ISBN 978-1-4472-7037-9

Hayes, Terrance, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (London & New York: Penguin Random House, 2018) ISBN 978-0-141-98911-2

Adcock, Juana, Split (Edinburgh: Blue Diode Press, 2019) ISBN 978-1-9164051-2-7