Collecting garbage

I don't recall how the topic came up but at some point during the MLA conference I found myself proposing that I ought to teach a course about the literature of garbage. We already teach literature courses called Concepts of Nature, Concepts of Progress, Concepts of Gender, and so on, so why not Concepts of Garbage?

I was only half joking. Every year in American Lit Survey I teach a section of the A.R. Ammons poem "Garbage," which asserts that garbage is the poetry of our time, and I always enjoy the moment when I write on the blackboard "garbage = poetry" and ask the class whether the equation works both ways. It makes for an interesting conversation, particularly since at that point we've already read and discussed the Robinson Jeffers poem "Shine, Perishing Republic" in which he asserts that we're all heading eventually for the compost bin.

I'm tempted to design a Garbage Lit course every time I re-read Our Mutual Friend, the wonderful Dickens novel in which garbage links every level of society, cutting across social strata and providing the hidden foundation for the sparkling lives of the privileged. Don DeLillo borrows this conceit for his massive novel Underworld, in which garbage links the worlds of art, politics, sport, and entertainment.

I'd love to juxtapose these readings in a class and see what comes from the combination, but two poems and two huge novels do not make a coherent course. I'm sure I'm overlooking some relevant works, and someone out there knows what they are. So come on: send me your garbage. It is, after all, the poetry of our time.