History

Summer Writing Progam 2004
Week Three: July 21 —July 27

Course #: Non-credit: WRI 053, tuition: $375 per week
Course #: BA: WRI 453, undergraduate tuition: $856 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 753, 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 by Lee Ann Brown is now being offered.

Translation & Intercultural Literary Arts
This week we will focus on traditional and experimental translation and international literary arts. We will look at writers exploring intercultural methods and themes within their creative work. We will also look at how investigative practices and collaboration can contribute to these explorations.

Stitching Together A Voice
Anselm Berrigan
I want to examine the artistic co-habitation of two apparently opposing ideas: that every poet has a distinct voice, and that every voice is constructed (a made thing). The main point: how to put both notions to use in order to write rich, long, complicated, independent-minded poems that handle multiple subjects and that audiences want to read and hear. We will read Kevin Davies' Comp., Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge, and my own Zero Star Hotel.

Language Is Love
Robin Blaser
Selected texts - copies supplied by instructor - will be read and discussed for the first day. Then students will be asked to present and read examples of their own writing for, one by one, discussion of the "way" of each person's sense of the love of language.

On the Edge of Mistranslation
Lee Ann Brown
This workshop will present a panoply of experiments for serious play within the expanded field of translation. We will work with "homophonic mistranslations" (writing from languages we don't know), writing multilingually in multiple registers, and "translating" poems from visual and musical sources. Please bring a willingness to take risks, encounter language in new ways and to work collaboratively.

Writing Memoir, Writing Life
Rebecca Brown
This course looks at the overlap of memory and writing, how we turn the stuff of our lives into true and not so true stories. We will read and discuss work by Virginia Woolf, Colette, Richard Wright, David Wojnarowicz and others as we explore the line between fiction and memoir.

Here and There
Samuel R. Delany
In this course we will look at poems and other writings in and from a number of languages and from a number of different times: Sappho, Catullus, Rimbaud, Lorca, Holderlin, and others, comparing originals with translations. And of course, we will be doing our own writing whether in another language or about the translation experience itself. Bring your own knowledge of languages to the workshop whether minimal or extensive and we'll see what results. Course packet will be provided.

Always Write Everything A Lot
Ed Friedman
Multiple projects, sources, genres, subjects, styles. This course is, most immediately, about quantity (how to write a lot) and eventually about quality. We'll (1) write in structured journals, (2) invent in a range of modes that vary in how much they challenge the writer's perceived momentum, and (3) work from existing texts, pictures, audiotape, etc. We'll balance attention.

Writing the Tao of Poetry
Sam Hamill
In this course we will explore the use and influence of poetry in translation and our own original poems, taking as a model Lu Chi's 4th century Art of Writing and Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior. There'll be a few writing exercises, and plenty of healthy discussion of The Way of Poetry as defined by old masters and new.

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!).

Bridging Worlds
Sonja Kravanja
We'll examine the translator's role as a co-creator; the importance of knowing not only the language of the original work but also the complexity of factors that make a culture unique. Literary translation as an art form rather than an academic endeavor. Translators from any language are invited.

Translation/Transformation/Collaboration....Literary Quick books!
Mary Laird
Students will print an edition of 50 accordion books. Each student will set one of their own poems of 5-10 lines. The theme for the week is international poetry in translation; a poem stemming from that base would be good, and any interpretation or expansion of what that means, considered. As a group we will collaborate on design of the 10 folio book and construct title and colophon pages together. Each student will design their own text page. Cover and text will be printed in two colors. Students will learn how to set and distribute type, print, some basic mechanics, and to make a simple book structure. Everyone will take home five copies of the edition.

Characteristics of Poetry
Alice Notley
What is and isn't a poem? How does this matter, if it does? We will look at work by dead and contemporary authors, do assignments and discuss the results.

A Sheet of Cross-Lined Paper
Bhanu Kapil Rider
Here, we'll investigate structures of transition. How can we write: where it vibrates; where the memory a work has, of itself, fails; where the light darkens, artificially or naturally, and we have to cross? Readings, cross-sectionally: Renee Gladman, Paul Auster, Cecilia Vicuna, Salman Rushdie.

Dictation, Imitation, Transformation
Laura Wright
Jack Spicer's poems were dictated to him from Martians. Where do our poems come from? We will read and imitate our favorite poets, our neighbors & our friends, rewrite our own (and others') works, and explore what it means to make a poem.

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003