In this seminar, we investigate the evolving boundaries of American poetry from the mid-20th century to the present, with a focus on experimental practices that challenge traditional notions of authorship, form, and meaning. From Fluxus manifestos and Oulipian procedures to digital poetics and AI-generated verse, we will trace how poetic experimentation intersects with larger artistic, cultural, and political movements. We will also complicate and unsettle the very category of the "experimental," asking what—and whom—it has historically centered or excluded. Poets such as Evie Shockley and others have interrogated what counts as experimental and from which vantage points, prompting us to rethink the whiteness often embedded in experimental canons and practices.

Each session centers on a different mode of experimental practice—such as conceptual writing, erasure, found poetry, concrete poetry, archival poetry and prose poetry—and situates it within its historical and aesthetic context. We will explore how these works reimagine what a poem is and what it can do, paying close attention to materiality, medium, and method. We will read works from poets ranging from Emmett Williams, Susan Howe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Paisley Rekdal to Solmaz Sharif, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Kenneth Goldsmith, Claudia Rankine, Chaun Webster, Anne Carson, Don Mee Choi, CAConrad, Evie Shockley, Erica Hunt and AI language models—spanning a wide spectrum of voices, eras, and experimental commitments.

Students are invited to engage with these forms not only analytically but also through creative exercises that mirror the techniques under study. This course requires no prior experience in writing poetry, only an openness to experimental forms of thinking and reading. Together, we will consider how experimental poetry may demand new interpretive approaches, and how it continues to evolve in response to changing technologies and social realities.

Kurs im HIS-LSF