This course will provide an introduction to contemporary American poetry and poetics. After looking at a few poets whose late twentieth-century writings set the stage for the post-9/11 era-among them probably John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe-we will explore the strange, various, challenging verse characteristic of the last decade, including Flarf and Conceptualism. We will read one book in its entirety--Ange Mlinko's Shoulder Season--as a prelude to the final assignment, a review of a recently published collection of poetry.