32201

SoSe 13: Foreign Entanglements: Recent Poetry on International War Zones

Sophia Frese

Comments

American investments in conflicts beyond the nation's borders exceed the monetary sphere and play out beyond the realm of foreign politics and media headlines, or direct military deployments. This seminar deals with poetry on conflict sites and war zones that have concerned American poets in the last 25 years. One focus will be the enduring strife in Israel-Palestine as diasporic writers of Jewish- and Palestinian decent see it. The poems of Sharif Elmusa, Nathalie Handal and Lisa SuhairMajaj negotiate Palestinian-American relations to an elusive Palestinian past and its diminished present in the occupied territories. Their work reveals not only an ongoing commitment to their ancestral homeland, but also indicates a continuous struggle to frame a diasporic subjectivity within the stress field of Palestine, Israel and America. Jewish-American poets like Robert Pinsky, Marge Piercy and C.K. Williams similarly attempt to make sense of their bond to Israel, a task that leads them to tend to the echoes of persecution and near annihilation of a people's consciousness, while also prompting them to consider Israel's and America's role in the region today. We will also be reading poetry from soldiers who were and continue to be employed in Iraq and Afghanistan under the auguries of the War on Terror. Brian Turner will be one of these war faring and battle fatigued poets whose workreflects on his combat experience in Iraq, on the masters of war, on death and the framing of the Other. Finally the poems of Juliana Spahr and SuheirHammad will serve as an invitation to think through the aesthetics of conflict and violence. Their texts challenge us to consider how American wars and proxy wars produce connectivity as well as disjuncture, how they evoke and create both community and enmity close