Voices from four cultures: contemporary poets Kei Miller, Denise Riley, Terrance Hayes and Juana Adcock

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. 

Learning outcomes

The learning outcomes for this course are:

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

Classes

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. 

Required reading

Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014
Denise Riley, Say Something Back (London: Picador, 2016
Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (London & New York: Penguin Random House, 2018)
Juana Adcock, Split (Edinburgh: Blue Diode Press, 2019)

Typical week: Monday to Friday

For each week of study you select a morning (Am) and an afternoon (Pm) course, each course has five sessions, one each day Monday to Friday. The maximum class size is 25 students. Your weekly courses are complemented by a series of two daily plenary lectures, exploring new ideas in a wide range of disciplines. To add to the learning experience, we are also planning additional evening talks and events.

Evaluation and Academic Credit 

If you are seeking to enhance your own study experience, or earn academic credit from your Cambridge Summer Programme studies at your home institution, you can submit written work for assessment for one or more of your courses. 

Essay questions are set and assessed against the University of Cambridge standard by your Course Director, a list of essay questions can be found in the Course Materials. Essays are submitted two weeks after the end of each course, so those studying for multiple weeks need to plan their time accordingly. There is an evaluation fee of £65 per essay.

For more information about writing essays see Evaluation and Academic Credit.

Certificate of attendance

A certificate of attendance will be sent to you electronically within a week of your courses finishing.