Introducing Week Three’s materials

Hello everyone! This week we’re diving into intertextuality. Poetic intertextuality emerges in many guises–from poets talking to each other’s work, and poems referencing or writing back to other poems, to poets writing across languages, and poems responding to other art forms. We’ll think closely about the way that translation impacts how we read poetry, and you’ll see me again when we consider specific kinds of intertextuality like ekphrasis.

Reading poetry can sometimes involve being a detective–being alert to things that sound familiar, that chime with other things we have read or have seen, tracking down what those connections might be, and thinking about what happens to a poem that includes a line from a literary work from another culture or another time, or a line from a protest song, or that references a work of art.