Module Information
Course Delivery
Delivery Type | Delivery length / details |
---|---|
Seminars / Tutorials | 20 Hours. Seminar. 10 x 2 hrs |
Assessment
Assessment Type | Assessment length / details | Proportion |
---|---|---|
Semester Assessment | 2 essays (3000 words each) Continuous Assessment: | 100% |
Supplementary Assessment | Resubmit or resit failed elements and/or make good any missing elements |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of the module students should typically be able to:
1. demonstrate knowledge of a wide range of contemporary British poetry from outside the 'mainstream'
2. engage in critical appreciation of the handling of language and form in particular poems;
3. relate the poetry to appropriate cultural contexts;
4. explain and engage with recent critical and/or theoretical debates about contemporary British poetry.
Brief description
This module by-passes the best-known landmarks - Larkin, Heaney, Hughes - and asks you to boldly go into hitherto unmapped territory. It takes for granted the fact that you probably find poetry reading quite difficult but also assumes that you are just as keen to encounter new and challenging work in poetry, as in, say, film or pictorial art. The module offers `poetry with an edge', and poetry with a strong contemporary flavour (it's a daffodil-free zone). It offers reading strategies for poetry, especially for poetry of an innovative kind. It seeks to remove it from the 'page vacuum' and looks at it in its various contexts, such as: the contemporary art scene, the processes of small-press publishing, the dynamics of reading and performance, the influences of 'alternative' cultures and lifestyles, and various networks of regional and political allegiances.
Content
_PROGRAMME
_Seminar 1: 'The End is Nigh'
- Reading short poems - a method discussed and exemplified.
- Carol Ann Duffy in Penguin Modern Poets: Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Eavan Boland. Crossing the border and breaking the 'women-poet' mould.
- Eavan Boland in Penguin Modern Poets: Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Eavan Boland. How does a woman poet inscribe herself in a masculine and national tradition of poetry?
- Poets from Making For Planet Alice: New Women Poets, ed. Maura Dooley, a lively and outspoken anthology of women poets who made their reputations in the 1990s.
- Black British Poetry: selections from James Berry (`Lucy' poems), Fred D'Aguiar ('Mama Dot' and 'Airy Hall') and David Dabydeen (Some audio-taped material will be used).
- Ekphastic poems are poems about pictures: this presentation considers some of the varieties of this increasingly popular genre.
- The 'New Gen' poetry promotion of 1994, as seen by Melvyn Bragg and the Southbank Show.
- Roy Fisher, The Dow Low Drop: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 1996). The laid-back urban annotations of the 'Poet Laureate of Brum' (with audio-tape material).
- Poets from Liverpool Accents: Seven Poets and a City, ed. Peter Robinson, Liverpool University Press, 1996.
- A further selection of poets from the Planet Alice anthology
Notes
This module is at CQFW Level 6