Join the avant-garde, issue a radical challenge to sense, and interrogate the nature of meaning in poetry.

When thinking about Nonsense Poetry, thoughts turn to the quirky, imagistic style of writers like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear; even Surrealist Poets’ attempts at senselessness took an imagistic form – what John Ashbery called “mere lists of exotic and goofy images”. This course will explore radical resistances to poetic sense-making, focusing on avant-garde moments including Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, the Russian Futurists/Formalist nexus, Dada, Oulippo, the Situationist International and Concrete Poetry, as well as contemporary political discourse and its crisis of meaningful language, as manifested in the rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, amongst others.