Description
*PLEASE NOTE: there will be no meeting on March 19; a makeup meeting is scheduled for May 7 to make eight sessions.*
“Because I have always had many certain problems with form, I consider myself a poet. […]
“There is no stability of form; all science extols that. Body is an interruption in another interruptive continuum, and vice versa. The reason to create form might be as a way of charting its fleet malleability. Or perhaps form means morph. I wish.”
—Stacy Doris, “I Have to Check My Email,” (2007)
All poets/makers welcome. Limited to 12 participants.
Can we think of form as something other than constraint? What if one’s entire life experience were the constraint, as it is for the Afro-Cuban poet Kamau Brathwaite? And where is the body in this? This workshop, open to all, entertains a troubled, tentacular curiosity. Here we’ll consider form in relation to time, to response-ability (Haraway), to force, to seeing-skin. How is form energy, as opposed to shape? Together, we’ll attempt to track its formations in our own works, and in the poetics/poetry of several modern and contemporary writers. Long Soldier, Moten, NourbeSe-Philip, Celan, Stacy Doris, Aisha Sasha John and Lisa Robertson, among others, will be our fellow poeologists… All poets/makers welcome.
The class work is comprised mainly of group critique of writing you bring in, discussion of texts/videos, and of writing exercises designed to improve technique and explore new approaches to creation.
Questions of composition, rhythm, gesture, engagement with broader social and political values, the body, and others will be considered.
Possible Readings
Stacy Doris, “I Have to Check My E-mail”
Kimiko Hahn, “Still Writing the Body“
CA Conrad, “The Right to Manifest Manifesto”
Paul Celan, “The Meridian”
“Lisa Robertson & Aisha Sasha John: In Conversation“, Book*hug Interview
M. NourbeSe-Philip, “Ignoring Poetry (a work in progress)”
Fred Moten, “An Interview with Fred Moten” Parts I and II, Lit Hub.
Layli Long Soldier, “Poetry as Prayer,” The Creative Independent
Derek Jarman, Blue
