This one took me a minute.

First of all, there are no books on the poetry of the American explorers and the earliest settlers that I have found. There are also no MOOCs or online classes and I didn’t have the opportunity to take any such classes when I was in college. Most anthologies start with later British colonial poets and if some are starting to include Indigenous and early Spanish colonial poetry, they are still missing the other colonial countries: France, The Netherlands, Sweden and Russia.

I figured there must not be much to research here. But that was only partially true.

Frist of all, there were poems the literary anthologists are still leaving out. Secondly, later-day poets love to ponder on and re-evaluate those early American explorers. And so the online research became a bit of a rabbit hole.

I’m not a poetry scholar in any sense. I mostly compile and bring together existing research. So this survey is definitely uneven and tentative. But that doesn’t mean it makes for a short class. It was fascinating and exciting poetry, the stuff that existed.

And then I had to try to figure out how to pronounce all those Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish and Russian names!! And for years I’ve been mispronouncing even some of the English names!

I’m not the best name pronouncer on a good day, so that was rough going while recording this weekend as I botched a few names.

I was also derailed by a recent family crisis in Cleveland and a cold a few weeks ago. But I made it through and here we are on the brink of a great adventure.

I just want to say I made some comments in the introduction where we start to talk about legacies and monuments (and holidays) around Christopher Columbus. I just want to elaborate on that because it is always controversial for someone somewhere. In any conflict, the victors and the defeated both want their memorials and monuments. For examples of the defeated who this applies to: Native American massacre sites and Confederate battle sites. We all have opinions on which monuments should stand. But the truth is America is made up (quite necessarily) out of the descendants of both the victors and the vanquished. And many Americans have relatives who were possibly both. Maybe we will come to a time someday when we can allow all Americans to grieve and pay respects to their dead without always turning it into a political crisis.

 

Access the class from the syllabus.