|
History
Summer Writing Progam 2003
Week Three: June 23 —June 29
Course #: Non-credit: WRI 053, tuition: $375
Course #: BA: WRI 353, undergraduate tuition: $765 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 653, graduate tuition: $1,032 per week
Cultural Activism: Writing Under the New World Order
"We invite citizens and workers in all fields to join in
the common endeavor; whatever our visions of the future, our
democracy and the nations of Earth should be steadfast and fierce
in the quest to establish sustainable culture on this planet."
- Declaration of Interdependence, SWP Community July 1990
As political and ecological crises intensify across our planet,
the writer's role raises troubling questions. Bard, "unacknowledged
legislator," prophet - or marginal wordmonger? We'll look at
arts and politics and how they feed into each other on a national
and international level. We'll also have the second session
of our Dharma Poetics Seminar, as we continue to explore the
arts and their relationship to contemplative practice.
Each student will register for one of the following workshops.
Path and Purpose
Junior Burke
In this class we will explore the commitment one embraces when
choosing Art as Dharma. We will look at the big picture, including
the place of Writing and Poetics in world affairs, with the
goal of each Writer arriving at a kind of Artistic Manifesto
in order to define and contextualize particular goals and challenges.
Writing as Practice, Writing as Transformation; serving through
pure inspiration and egoless, imparting of wisdom.
Leaving the Page
Brenda Coultas
This workshop is about coming out from behind the page and engaging
the public directly. We will conduct writing experiments in
which we, as poets, become public investigators, conducting
interviews, documenting public space, and inviting people to
participate. The goal is to allow this data collecting to enrich,
enthuse and shape us as human beings and writers.
The Lyric Essay
John D'Agata
The focus of our workshop will be on lyric essays, a form of
nonfiction that can accomodate the breadth of the genre's range--personal
essays, travelogues, biographies, literary journalism, meditative
essays, etc.--but always with an emphasis on the poetic roots
of nonfiction rather than its more conventional leanings toward
fiction. The purpose of the workshop will be to produce new
work, so leave your memoir at home.
Short Short Prose Fiction
Donald Guravich
That's not poetry, that's prose! That's not prose, that's poetry!
We'll look at some of the roots (Baudelaire, Cendrars, Walser)
of this relatively new literary form and see how it has developed.
There will be writing exercises in the workshop, and writing
assignments.
Political Avant-garde and Performance Writing
Carla Harryman
The class is tailored to writers with an interest in performance
writing and the writer as a political subject. The literary/historical
focus of the class is the "space between" modernism and post-modernism.
We will read about the history of performance art starting with
Futurism and discuss the implications for a poetics of avant-garde
(political) performance now. Assigned readings will include
Rose Lee Goldberg's Performance Art, Raymond Williams Marxism
and Literature and samples from Dada, Stein, Templeton, Harryman
and others. Students will be assigned writing "problems," which
will provide them with the means to generate writing quickly.
Community and Friendship: Poets from the Northwest: Gary
Snyder, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, Albert Saijo
Joanne Kyger
This group of writers from mid-20th Century Pacific Northwest
developed their own literary style, voice, and lineage. We will
read their poetry and do writing exercises based around the
work of these writers.
Collaboration/Transformation: Letterpress Meets Spontaneity
Mary Laird
Students will print an edition of 50 accordion books. Each student
will set one of their own poems, of 5-10 lines. As a group we
will collaborate on design of the 10 folio accordion book and
construct title and colophon pages together. The cover and text
will be printed in two colors. Students will learn how to set
and distribute type, print, some basic mechanics, and how to
make a simple book structure. Everyone will take home 5 copies
of the edition plus 5-10 copies of their poem as a separate
broadsheet, time providing.
I/not I
Akilah
Oliver
What is the value of positing the body as a topographic site
that stands in for, dialogues with, the social and natural worlds?
This workshop will focus on ways that we can write not about
the world around us, from the self-reflective subject position,
but rather to write from a contested center, the body to enter
into a dialogue with the very way language systems act as codes
in the world. We will work on a sustained poem that investigates
Luce Irigaray's statement: "The transformation of the autobiographical
I into another cultural I seems to be necessary if we are to
establish a new ethics of sexual difference." What other new
ethics can a poetry invite that assumes the experiential voice
of the I to work as a cultural devise, as a larger cultural
body?
Paying Attention Towards Developing the Poem
Maureen Owen
This workshop will look at how the history and development of
the English language influence its poetics. We will consider
the constructions of vowels and consonants, the rhythms that
have developed from this rich combination, and the effects of
other languages that have become part of everyday English. Students
will exercise the art of listening to the culture around them
and practice how to actively engage their own writing. We will
draw on works by poets from different periods, traditions, and
genres as samples of this ecology.
Deforming Poetry
Jeffrey Robinson
"Poetry fetter'd, fetters the human race" (Blake). Conventional
poetic form and syntax can, over time, fetter the imagination
of both reader and writer. Deformation, a radical intervention
into the formal elements of a poem (e.g. reading a poem backwards,
isolating certain grammatical elements of a poem, selecting
words consciously from a poem to make a "new" one), opens the
imagination to a familiar poem in dramatically unfamiliar ways.
We will practice deforming familiar poems, read published deformations,
and write our own deforming poems.
Activism as Performance
Anne Waldman
The vocal cords and pen should be mightier than the sword and
daisy-cutter. We will practice rhizomic experiments of attention,
focus on alternative texts and manifestoes from Ammiel Alcalay,
Etel Adnan, David Levi Strauss, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Arundhati
Roy, and be liberated by assorted poetries. Video and recording
skills invited. We will create a meta-text to change the world.
Poetics in the Expanded Field
Barrett Watten
We will move between poetry, visual art, music, and critical
theory to address the question, "What is poetics?" Poetics in
this class is not a "defense of poetry" or simply a description
of poetic practice. Rather, it is a mode of engagement that
begins with poetry as a genre but may also include other forms
of art, critical theory, and political engagement. Using our
required text, we will explore the poetics of: chance-generated
textuality; literary group formation; the poetics listserv conversations;
Detroit techno and the social space of Detroit; word and image
manifestoes, etc. A student project in poetics will be a part
of the course. Required text: Barrett Watten, The Constructivist
Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan University
Press).
"How do we keep our lives,
at their most gladly and
brokenly open,
on the page, in the air?"
- Bhanu Kapil Rider
Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four
Previous Summer Writing Program Information
2006
2005
2004
2003
|
