History

Summer Writing Progam 2004
Week Two: July 14 —July 20

Course #: Non-credit: WRI 052, tuition: $375 per week
Course #: BA: WRI 452, undergraduate tuition: $856 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 752, graduate tuition: $1,168 per week
Please Note: The tuition rates for credit students have changed. These tuition rates replace the old tuition rates listed in the SWP 2004 catalog and previously listed on this website. The tuition rate for non-credit students has not changed.

Please note that a new workshop "Garrulous and gutteral: Making the (mini) epic" by Deborah Richards is now being offered. Ammiel Alcalay's workshop "Foreign Policy / Domestic Space" has been cancelled.

Please note that a new workshop by Eliot Katzis now being offered

Political Activism & Writing
This week we will focus on politics, identity, and activism, exploring the impact of both direct and indirect actions in the midst of this ongoing turbulent political time. When do we act? When do we take to the streets? How or when do we as writers take on the position of lobbyists? When do we turn our writing skills towards the manifesto? How do we stay skillful in our means rather than buying into cynicism? Many of our faculty this week are cultural activists and infrastructure workers. Together we will examine our roles and responsibilities as writers and members of a community.

"Garrulous and gutteral": Making the (mini)epic
Deborah Richards
We will use the epic as our method for recreating the minor and major events of our times. Taking Gwendolyn Brooks' poems "The Anniad" and " Appendix to the Anniad" as one of our steps, we will write personal and collective loose-leaf diaries. These musings, ramblings, narratives, and incisive commentaries will recount miseries and disastrous events. The next steps will organize these collections into epic texts.

Please bring loose pages for the journal, newspaper clippings, and a one-page photocopy from a traditional/non-traditional epic poem (e.g. Homer's Illiad, C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining) or novel (e.g. Faulkner's Absolom, Absolom, Toni Morrison's Beloved ) to the first session.

Revolutionary Art and Cultural Revolution
Amiri Baraka
Discuss and read examples of revolutionary art and cultural revolution and what it means in the USA today, comparing this to other epochs of the Cultural Revolution, China, USSR, US, and Latin America. Reading: Extraordinary Measures by Lorenzo Thomas, and Art on the Line edited by Jack Hirschman. A course packet with readings from Black Art, Revolutionary Art, Djeli Ya, Marxism and Poetry, and Yenan Forum will be provided.

What Is A Citizen?
Bhanu Kapil Rider
What is a citizen? Writing: we will invent the body of a citizen moving through a city made of broken fictions: a city in emergency. In this city, a city at war, is the citizen capable of intimate acts? (The mouth, opening and closing...how delicious! -- etc.) What does it mean, for example, to love, at such a time: in these times? As I imagine it, we will write the sexual, failing citizen who occurs at the exploding point between one kind of life and another.

The Critical Activity of Poetry
Alan Gilbert
Boundaries as borders are places of intersection. In this workshop, we will think about poetry's intersection with culture, history, and identity. These concerns will be addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective as well, and examples from contemporary visual art, music, and criticism will also be discussed in the workshop.

Exploding Text: Poetry Performance as a Tool for Activation
Bob Holman
A hands-on exploration of a full-bodied literature, providing a theoretical basis for spoken word poetics via deep reading and analysis of text with a launch into physical analogues via performance practice. There is a microphone in the room. Hiphop, Jeliya, Dada, Futurism, New York School, Rock, Beat, Black Mountain, Slam and other traditions weave through the curriculum. We engage media other than print: video and audio recording, live music collaborations, poets theater, and the internet are all considered. Texts include Literacy & Orality: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter Ong, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford. Please be familiar with Nathaniel Mackey (Whatsaid Serif), Harryette Mullen (Sleeping with the Dictionary), and Alice Notley (The Descent of Alette).

The Edge: A Fiction Workshop
Laird Hunt
In-class reading, writing and charged discussion will help us to explore work that busts paradigms, interrupts order, rewrites history, and upsets the apple cart of standard received notions of the literary status quo. Risk-taking, groundbreaking younger writers we will look at to fuel our discussion and inspire our own writing efforts will include Renee Gladman, Mary Caponegro, Colson Whitehead, Ben Marcus, Thalia Field, Pamela Lu, Jane Unrue and Thomas Glave.

Turning Political Ideas and Observations into Poetry:
Some Lessons from the Legacy of Allen Ginsberg
Eliot Katz
Looking primarily at Allen Ginsberg's Selected Poems, we will explore some of the poetic tools and strategies that can be used to turn social perceptions, critiques, and hopes into memorable poems. We will also read and discuss a course packet featuring a variety of political poems (and a few essays) from the 20th century, including work by Pablo Neruda, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Margaret Walker, William Carlos Williams, Andre Breton, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Adrienne Rich, Jayne Cortez, Gregory Corso, Denise Levertov, Pedro Pietri, and more.

This Poem Which Is Not One
Rachel Levitsky
The poet, or writer with poetic sensibility, isn't omniscient but must be several. In this workshop, to which poets and hybrid and prose writers are encouraged, we will investigate the positions we are inclined to write from, exploit them, and try to find and exploit angles that may be new. In reading excerpts of work by writers who operate and integrate this multiplicity (Waldrop, Bersenbrugge, Cixous, Gladman, Harryman, Alcalay, Nguyen, Ashbery, Pound, Lu, Toscano, Watten, Acker) we will encounter texts that challenge the notion of a separation between art and politics, or that politics causes poetry to be boring and didactic. (Students are asked to buy and read Alice Notley's Disobedience and to bring to class 5 to 10 pages of their own work that span the various periods of their writing life.)

Exploring Eden
Gloria Frym
Exploratory derives from Latin and Middle English roots that denote searching, in the least known parts, or designed to acquaint with the outlines or first elements of a subject. What if, in exploring a terrain, such as the page, or the mind or the body, one imagined or actually encountered what one had not experienced before? And one had to make something of the newness. For writers, words are generally known entities, but the way words are put together (or dismantled) as language may not have a name yet. So, we could dwell in that wonderful Eden, before category. It depends upon what you bring to the table and how adventurous you feel. Bi-genre, on the cusp, hybrid, borderline between earth and unnamed space, alyrical, lyrical to a fault, poem in prose, narrative lyricism, lyrical narrative, abstract passionism? Part of this workshop will involve a few texts that will ignite new writing. A short reader will be used.

The Elegiac Activist
Kristin Prevallet
This creative reading / active writing workshop will focus on the politics of poetics. We will think and write through a variety of texts which engage, in multiple ways, the elegiac form (poetic reflections of loss--of objects and loved ones, as well as the larger sadnesses of the current state of the world). After first examining the history and reading examples of elegy, we will write an elegiac mediation that is as political as it is personal. Thinking through this form, the course will attempt to lay out a strategy for how personal spaces of mourning can intersect with public spaces of political protest.

Poetry as a Spiritual Practice: A Writing Workshop
Sonia Sanchez
In many traditions around the world, poetry is a way of cultivating and expressing the deepest elements of the human experience. Developing an artistic practice such as poetry writing can be a wonderful tool for anyone who wishes to increase his or her awareness - of self, of community, of connection to the eternal. Through written exercises, class discussion, and reflection on her own life as poet, activist, mother, teacher, and seeker, Sonia Sanchez will guide participants to use writing as a resource for enhancing awareness of spirituality in daily life.

Exploring the book
Peter and Donna Thomas
In this workshop we will make two portfolios, one with words gathered from the poets and writers in residence, and one with our own. Students will learn letterpress basics as we print the text and gain bookbinding skills when we make the "dowel spine portfolio structure" to hold the words.

Feminafesto Poetics: is There Anyone Under That Burqa?
Anne Waldman
Sisters Arise! It's time to re-articulate a poetics out of our female bodies beyond gender! It's time to write our own inaugural speeches, run for poetic office, collaborate on a politics of engagement, think communally of how best to vocalize the woe of so many others (human & animal & vegetable & mineral) and serve to wake up all the dreamers of late capitalism. We will engage in an investigative document project involving performance, video and agit prop. Men and any other genders welcome. Please arrive with a text from another part of the world than white america.

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003