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In the preface to his book Khurbn (1989), written while travelling to his family’s ancestral village in Poland and confronting their experience of the Holocaust, the poet Jerome Rothenberg writes that “poetry is the voice of the dead.” Similarly, NourbeSe Philip, in the afterward to her book Zong! (2008), describes herself as a seer working through and against the historical archive of slavery to “tell the story that can’t be told.” This course takes from these statements a conception of the poet as both historical witness and seer, an individual whose work channels and mediates experiences of collective loss that can never be fully spoken - only lived with, transformed, and incompletely shared. Writing from within a world made by histories of catastrophe such a poetics works against discourses that may disavow, reify, or otherwise contain such loss in narratives of progress or individual redemption. Instead, an historically visionary poetics is one in which the force of collective loss is mediated as a felt sense of both catastrophe and ongoing potential in our present moment, and where the reader is not asked to witness but rather to bear the urgency of history toward the transformation of our shared world. Throughout the course we will engage the work of poets from across the Americas writing in relation to specific histories of collective loss to consider what constitutes a political poetics and to ask ourselves what it means to read and live with or in relation to such loss as we struggle for liberation.