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Poets responding to a host of asininities and personal or social abuses, inequities, or unenviable circumstances—among others, industrialization, climate change, classism, racism, war, colonial barbarism and duplicity, oppression, hypocrisy, ignorance, betrayal, nepotism, misfortune, and love (gone awry)—have left us a legacy of some of the most ferocious and memorable poetry. In this seminar, we will read and relish good angry verse, including curses, swears, rants, and taunts from Archilochus to Catullus to William Blake to Baudelaire to Gerald Stern, in tones that scale from the reticent to the combative.

Bhisham Bherwani is the author of the poetry books The Second Night of the Spirit, The Circling Canopy, and Life in Peacetime. He is the co-editor of The Shrine Whose Shape I Am: The Collected Poetry of Samuel Menashe and was the guest editor of the Atlanta Review anthology of modern and contemporary anglophone Indian poetry. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The American Reader, Commonweal, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Plume, and The Yale Review. He is the founder and editor of Audubon Terrace Press, an independent publisher of exceptional but overlooked poetry and related literature. He has taught literature and creative writing at the City University of New York.