June 18-24
Week Two
Cultural Rhizomes and Intentional
Communities
The rhizome is a tuber system, horizontal, a veritable
Indra’s Net of association and growth and “high energy constructs”. It furthers
a view of our mutual interdependence. How do our individual cultures, or unsung
and diverse communities, interact and foster new creative projects in exchange
and translation? How do we represent and cultivate the tangibles and particulars
of our languages, mores, poetic forms and alternative communities or “temporary
autonomous zones”? Our work this week will seek inspiration from intentional
communities such as Black Mountain College, diasporas of the Middle East and
South America, and Native American praxis. Some of our guests have been
instrumental in political activism on behalf of LGBT communities. Other have
founded projects that support multi-lingual libraries and schools. Our own
writing can be
radical and powerful and reflect the diversity in our
world.
Non-credit Course #: WRI 052, tuition: $475 per week
WRI
452, tuition: $1350 per week
WRI 752, tuition: $1800 per
week
Sherwin Bitsui Saad bee nááchá: PoetryThe poems
we create and learn from in this is workshop will help enable us to connect to
the land and each other. We will examine Dine’ world-view and poetics for
inspiration and draw from them – continuing ways of re-embodying language with
song, thus reconnecting ourselves to the world around us and each other. We will
write from this space and speak forth new poems from the ground we uncover
together.
Sherwin Bitsui is the author of two poetry books, Flood Song
(Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003).
His honors include a 2011 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a 2011 Native Arts &
Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship for Literature, a 2010 PEN Open Book
Award, an American Book Award and a Whiting Writers Award. He is originally from
Baa’oogeedí (White Cone, Arizona on the Navajo Nation). He is Diné of the
Todich’íi’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tł’ízíłání (Many Goats
Clan).
CAConrad (Soma)tic Poetry: Flowers Dreaming The Elevation
AllegianceThe aim of (Soma)tic poetry and poetics is the realization of
two basic ideas: (1) Everything around us has a creative viability with the
potential to spur new modes of thought and imaginative output. (2) The most
vital ingredient to bringing sustainable, human changes to our world is
creativity. Among other things we will build a Human Hibernaculum, a place for
our poems to THRIVE by the very community of our workshop!
CAConrad is
the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012), The Book of
Frank (Wave Books, 2010), Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009),
Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank
Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010). He is a
2012 Ucross Fellow, a 2011 Pew Fellow, and has conducted poetry workshops in New
York, Seattle, Boise, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.
Danielle
Dutton Writing in PlaceWe will engage a weeklong meditation on place in
writing, discussing everything from maps by Denis Wood to installations by Do-Ho
Suh to fiction by Renee Gladman. We’ll consider the myriad ways writers use
place as more than simple backdrop – as character, philosophy, motivation,
commentary, etc. Readings will be geared toward prose, but all are welcome.
Assignments and exercises will allow you to explore aspects of place in your
writing.
Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life and S P R A
W L, a finalist last year for the Believer Book Award. From 2006-2012, she
taught fiction writing and literature courses in the Jack Kerouac School; during
four of those years she also designed books at Dalkey Archive Press. Danielle is
currently assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and ditor
of Dorothy, a publishing project.
Allison Hedge Coke Rhizomes: Ride of
a Lifetime
Cultural duty and attentiveness is generated by kinships
working on a community member and nurtured by the member's tangible return. In
our work, our intentionality, our active involvement, our return is a perpetual
embrace, one we adhere to, further, honor, and support each time we deliver
ourselves into creative process and recognition of our inheritances. This
multi-genre workshop brings us back to reason. This course will include an
eco-ethos and employ the learned behavior in migration as impetus for kinship
value.
Allison Hedge Coke is the author of Dog Road Woman, Off-Season
City Pipe, Blood Run, and Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. Her edited collections
include: Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Effigies, and Effigies II.
Hedge Coke directs the Literary Sandhill CraneFest and has had recent
fellowships with Weymouth Center for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, Kimmel
Harding Nelson Center, and the Center for Great Plains. She is MFA faculty for
the University of Nebraska.
Bob Holman An Ecology of Consciousness:
From the Poetry Communities
of the Lower East Side to the Global Language
Crisis, A Poetry Activist’s PrimerOr, How Running the Poetry Project w/
Bernadette, Being the Original Slam Master of the Nuyorican, Starting The Stoop
@ Steve Cannon’s Tribes, and Founding the Bowery Poetry Club, w/ Stops Along the
Way to Produce The United State of Poetry for PBS & Create Mouth
Almighty/Mercury Records, Led Me To Host Word Up! Languages in Danger on PBS.
And How I Co-Raised the Kids, Wrote the Books & Moved www.bobholman.com to
Tumblr, In the Meantime.
Bob Holman is a co-director of the Endangered
Language Alliance. He is currently writing The Endangered Cento, a video poem
where each line is from a poem in a different threatened language. His research
into the roots of hip hop in Africa led him to the understanding that of the
6500 languages on earth, half will be gone by the end of this century, and
redirected his work towards using poetry to illuminate this
crisis.
Laird Hunt Technologies of Disruption
Through
examination of some of the approaches taken in postmodern fiction we will
attempt to deepen our understanding of the range of techniques and tactics 21st
century writers have at their disposal. Come prepared to write.
Laird
Hunt's novels include The Impossibly and The Exquisite. A new novel, Kind One,
will be published by Coffee House press in Fall 2012.
Pierre Joris
& Nicole Peyrafitte domopoetics wor(k)shi/op
This workshop is an
open space in and around which to practice personal, collective and rhizomatic
processes of writing, translation and performance. The workshop offers a
collective experimental & heuristic daily practice that moves between
Peyrafitte’s concept of “Vulvic space” — a homeomorphic topology or
transformable conceptual space enhancing the exchanges between self &
other(s) — and Joris’ nomadic writerly processes and their insistence on a
“barzakh,” i.e. a navigable archipelago or archipelago
“in-betweeness.”
Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte’s collaborations
since the early 90s include a range of duo multimedia performances, many book
covers & illustrations, & raising two sons. Peyrafitte’s latest
multimedia performance (including texts, paintings & onstage food
preparation) is “Bi-Valve;” she is presently co-directing a film on artist Basil
King. Pierre Joris just finished an anthology of Maghrebian literature, &
has two books of poems forthcoming, Meditations on the Stations of Mansur
al-Hallaj and Aljibar America.
Vincent Katz Crossing Over:
Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity
This course will start from the
thesis that art is created by interactions between and among individuals. We
will look at the rich history of collaborative efforts, from French modernism to
American experiments in combining word and image, word and sound, word and film,
and publishing. Nexuses will include Pound and visual art, New York School,
Black Mountain, and Wallace Berman’s Semina. Students will be given assignments
involving responding to works of visual art and sound, including experiments in
collaboration.
Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and teacher. He is the
author of eleven books of poetry, two books of translation, and numerous
articles and essays. Katz curated an exhibition on Black Mountain College at the
Reina Sofia museum in Madrid and edited the catalogue, Black Mountain College:
Experiment In Art (MIT, 2002). He translated The Complete Elegies Of Sextus
Propertius (Princeton, 2004) and is the author of Alcuni Telefonini (Granary
Books, 2008), a collaboration with painter Francesco Clemente.
Stephen Motika Rhizomatic Lives: A Multiplicity of
Engagements
We'll read and discuss work by a diverse group of
artists and writers engaging the representation of subjectivity, self and
other(s), as we write about lives, our own and those around us. We'll think
rhizomatically, across chronology and history, in an effort to break down the
genres of autobiography and biography and radicalize our own ways of telling.
We'll look at work by Etel Adnan, Joe Brainard, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Danielle
Collobert, C.S. Giscombe, Lyn Hejinian, Harry Partch, and Lisa Robertson. We'll
deconstruct several commons forms--diary, letter, memoir, interview,
obituary--and experiment with our own writing practice to create new texts and
poems that represent the complexity of our lives.
Stephen Motika's first
book, Western Practice, will be published by Alice James Books in April 2012. He
is also the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009). A
2010-2011 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident, he is the program
director at Poets House and the editor and publisher of Nightboat
Books.
Alexs Pate Engaging the Good: Community, Writer,
CharacterThis is a fiction and prose poetry workshop that plays off of
the Aristotelian idea of good as “the thing for which all other things are
done.” We will examine the various communities represented in the class, the
writers themselves and the characters they create and talk about the way
goodness operates at each phase of a story’s creation.
Alexs Pate is the
author of five novels including the New York Times Bestseller, Amistad
commissioned by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks/SKG and based on the screenplay by
David Franzoni. Other novels are Losing Absalom, Finding Makeba, The
Multicultiboho Sideshow and West of Rehoboth which was selected as “Honor
Fiction Book” for 2002 by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Alexs’ first book of nonfiction, In The Heart of the Beat: The Poetry of Rap was
published by Scarecrow Press in January 2010. His memoir, The Past is Perfect:
Memoir of a Father/Son Reunion will be published next year by Coffee House
Press.
Wang Ping Kinship of Rivers
We’ll brainstorm and
meditate on rivers, their beauty, symbols and movements, their connections with
us, within us… Rivers run through us as blood, as poetry, as art. We’ll write
river poems in various forms: lyrics, prose poems, collages, and we’ll make
rivers flags with our words and art, hang them as prayer flags, and let the wind
spread our wishes into the world. Please check out www.kinshipofrivers.org for
more details.
Wang Ping was born in China and came to the U.S. in 1986.
Her publications of poetry and prose include American Visa, Foreign Devil, Of
Flesh and Spirit, New Generation: Poetry from China Today, Aching for Beauty:
Footbinding in China, The Magic Whip, The Dragon Emperor, and The Last Communist
Virgin. She won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities and is
the recipient of NEA and the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry. Her photo and
video installation, “Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges,” was
exhibited at Macalester Art Gallery in March, 2007 and Ban-fille Lock Center,
2008. She is associate professor of English at Macalester
College.
Margaret Randall Befriend the Rhizome
What is
connected, what broken? A poetry workshop for students serious about craft.
Prepare to bring poems to first session. Class will include exercises and
writing assignments. "We who see a field of broken bones / view pale faces / on
memory’s imprint / befriend the rhizome: / neither beginning nor end. / Balanced
at midpoint, / we resist chronology and claim our place / as nomads on a savage
map of risk…"
Margaret Randall is a lesbian feminist poet, essayist,
photographer and social activist. She spent 23 years in Latin America (Mexico,
Cuba, Nicaragua) and returned to the U.S. only to be ordered deported because of
the content of some of her books. She won her case in 1989. Recent books of
poetry include As If The Empty Chair / Como Si La Silla Vacia and Ruins. She
lives in New Mexico.
Julia Seko Typographic Conversations: Letterpress
as Collective Art
We’ll bring our voices together in this
introductory letterpress workshop by writing, designing, and printing a
collaborative project. Students will learn about typographic design and the
basic techniques of letterpress printing. We’ll create community by setting
type, mixing ink, folding paper, and running machinery, and surprise ourselves
with what comes off the presses.
Julia Seko is a letterpress printer,
book artist, and proprietor of P.S. Press. She learned letterpress printing at
the Women's Graphic Center in Los Angeles and has had inky fingernails ever
since. She is adjunct faculty at Naropa University, where she helped set up the
letterpress studio, and is active in the Book Arts League. Her letterpress work
is in university and private collections and has been exhibited in the United
States and abroad.
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