History

Summer Writing Progam 2003
Week One: June 16 —June 22

Course #: Non-credit: WRI 052, tuition: $375
Course #: BA: WRI 352, undergraduate tuition: $765 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 652, graduate tuition: $1,032 per week

Cross-cultural and International Studies

"Always treat language like a dangerous toy." - Anselm Hollo

This week we'll look beyond our contemporary borders and explore writing from a diverse range of time-zones. Whether we're talking about ancient poetic traditions or contemporary Arabic literature, the exploration of these rich multi-lingual and multi-cultural arts can inform our current writing practice. Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg, co-editors of Poems for the Millennium, will give a joint lecture about the creation of this comprehensive two-volume collection. We'll also be joined by translators from and to French, Algerian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, English, and Czech.

Each student will register for one of the following workshops.

Reach of Prose
Renee Gladman
If the subject of our writing appeared to us as a horizon - beckoning, though always receding - how would we move toward it? What would it mean to write toward an impossible arrival? These are two of many questions we will ask in this workshop investigating the intersections of poetry, fiction, philosophy, and autobiography.

Talking on the Page
Bobbie Louise Hawkins
You've been talking for as long as you can remember. Charles Olson once said "Conversation is where we practice". If you can direct your skills as a talker, together with the "editing" that happens in a split second in conversation, to the page as text it will give you, in your writing, the variety of tone and intent you've already achieved. This workshop is based on Speech Directed Toward Text. Monologue, Letters, Diaries (all fictional) will be the basic variety for developing character and storylines.

Coupling the Beautiful and the Horrendous
Allison Hedge Coke
Coupling the Beautiful and the Horrendous, therapeutic writing for living well. Surviving trauma requires anchoring device for coping mechanism. This course provides replication of actual psychological phenomena necessary for healing and growth. The exercises are both poetry and prose appropriate. This is an active course, expect writing exercises.

The Morphing Texts: Translation, Transformation
Anselm Hollo
An introduction to the history, practice, and *idea* of translation. A look at existing translations of familiar and unfamiliar poems, and attempts to create our own. No "foreign language" skills required (this one's quite foreign enough!).

Europeans: A Fiction Workshop
Laird Hunt
In this workshop we will turn our attention away from the American scene and explore the work (in translation when needed) of contemporary European fiction writers like Natasza Goerke, Zadie Smith, Michel Houellebecq, Andre Makine, and others. Keyed to our discussion of these writings will be a series of exercises aimed both at helping us find our way into the work we are confronting and at moving forward with our own writing.

Contemporary Czech Literature
Pavla Jonssonova
We will read translations of contemporary Czech writings and discuss their transformations after the "velvet revolution." We will examine present paths crossings of those who had left Czechoslovakia in search of freedom of speech prior to 1989 and those who had decided to stay in their then totalitarian homeland.

Translating Performance and Performing Translation
Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte
These co-taught workshops will focus on a range of methods for transforming the various materials of art (words, images, sounds, movements) via techniques of "translation" (inter- or intra-lingual, inter- and intra-media) and "performance" (from page to stage) to show how such transformations are primary to the process of poesis.

Beginning Letterpress Printing
Catherine Michaelis
Learn the beauty of moveable type, finger the weight of each letter, the shape reversed until inked onto paper with the magic of letterpress. This class covers the basics: typesetting, lock-up, and makeready. We'll design and print a unique collaborative project.

The Ecstatic Notebook Life
Bhanu Kapil Rider
Standing up, we raise our glasses to Lorca. How do we keep our lives, at their most gladly and brokenly open, on the page, in the air? Hanuman devotionals via Helene Cixous. Here, we'll read for those attempts and practice the line that holds, wants to hold "a crocus, blackened joy."

Writing Through: The Practice of Othering
Jerome Rothenberg
The workshop will focus on techniques of composition that involve interactive engagement with the work of significant or influential "others." Translation, collage, gematria, mediumship, and other appropriative techniques will be referred to as needed. Texts we'll examine include Rothenberg's Gematria, The Lorca Variations and Mac Low's Representative Works.

Departures: A Way to Start the Poem
Patricia Spears Jones
"Nor asked: Is there a violence sadder than the word island?" from Islandia by Maria Negroni, translated by Anne Twitty "I can't go out anymore./I shall sit on my ceiling./Would you wear my eyes?" from Cranial Guitar: Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman These questions are points of departure, sites where a writer can begin his or her journey into poems. Our workshop will focus on these two radically different and experimental texts. Negroni's examines the idea of the epic, while Kaufman creates his own brand of cross-culturalism. Together, we'll explore the joys and challenges of working on formal craft issues while asking, and possibly answering, those questions that will lead others on their journeys in the future.

Into The Mystic (with ordinary terms)
Bernhard Widder
The title is a quote from Van Morrison, an early solo album from the late 60s. I want to dedicate the themes of the course to the poetics of Christian Loidl (1957-2001). Using as stratum a body of earlier poems by the late Austrian avant-garde essayist, critic, poet and performance artist, I'll demonstrate the literary possibilities with mystic experience and (self) ironical observation of everyday life, or sarcastic political comment, in Loidl's poems often appearing within a few lines. Starting from shorter poems of Christian Loidl's, the participants are welcome and invited to explore a range of juxtaposed images or subjects and combine diverse aspects into a poetic work.

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003