Week One Courses

Noncredit Course #: WRI 051; tuition: $400 per week
BA Course #: WRI 351; undergraduate tuition (1.5 credits): TBA
MFA Course #: WRI 651; graduate tuition (2 credits): TBA

What does it mean to stay awake, aware and imaginatively attuned to the struggles and vicissitudes of all the denizens of the planet—from Darfur to New Orleans, from coral reefs to polar bear realms? What is our imagination of “other”—animal, vegetable, mineral—and how do we practice it as writers and activists? Investigative poetics will be summoned this week as characterized by “istorin,” the root word of “history”: to find out for ourselves. We will challenge the euphemisms of “denial” and encounter the hard facts of global warming and grotesque and incessant war. We will explore issues of landscape, dream, genomes and prophecy. Narrative, anti-narrative, memory work and poethical song will be invoked as a means of “survival dancing.”

Required and Suggested Readings

Rebecca Brown
Writing War
How much is any war every war? How much is any enemy our self? What happens when living in a war intersects with the regular trouble of growing up, of trying to love, of figuring out the difference between whatever we want to think is true and what is something else. We’ll look at how several writers have written about war from the point of view of “non-participants”—children, partners— and in complicated retrospect. Readings will include authors Günter Grass, Kenzaburo Oe, Marguerite Duras.

Wanda Coleman
Just added! Workshop details coming soon.

Jack Collom
What’s Funny? Nature?
Stan Brakhage once remarked to me, “Nature’s not a bad artist.” She’s a wondrous comedian, too, contrary to popular belief. Looking in the mirror should convince anyone of this, but the attitude persists that Nature lacks irony. We’ll see about that. Naturally, we’ll study humor, practice nature via the artificial field of writing, perceive the humor in that and analyze the nature of having done so.

Samuel R. Delany
Fiction Workshop
There are many correspondences between the ecology of the earth and the ecology of human relationships, both among parts of the self and with others. This week we'll try to write through, with, and around some of these relations — with a close look at settings from both an emotional point of view and simply as verbal opportunities.

Laird Hunt
Adventures in Oulipo
From considering signal acts of anticipatory plagiarism, such as those carried out by Italo Calvino and Harry Mathews, to examining recently constructed lipograms (Eunoia by Christian Bok) and time-based constraints (Memory by Bernadette Mayer), we will attempt to chart the ludic course of Oulipian endeavor. As we investigate the various manifestations of Oulipo and its offshoots. We will bring our gleanings to bear on our own writing.

Bhanu Kapil and Andrea Spain
Non-Reproductivity and Emergence: Writing the Unseen
For a species, works or artifacts to survive, you have to have whole stores of non-reproductive populations. What is the role of articulated yet unseen, unmeasured and unselected content in the production of the new? We’ll consider the parts of writing practices that are unseen or “useless”—notebooks, scraps, omissions, murmurs, unpublished works—in their relationship to the emergent works we’re creating in the present.

Mark Nowak
The Poetics of (Liquid) Fear
How can we imagine a poetics in what Zygmunt Bauman terms our “liquid modern” era, a poetics in dialogue with flood (Katrina) and drought ( Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia), lightning (Sago), and tidal wave (the South and Southeast Asian tsunami)? We’ll examine verse traditions from the 1927 Mississippi flood and Katrina and produce first person singular and plural poetic/theatrical responses to the liquid modern.

Michelle Naka Pierce
Am Not Amnesia: A Poetics of Retrieval
We’ll examine notions of partial or total memory loss and the effects on building histories, both personal and cultural. What are the reusable materials/conditions of our past? How can we regain consciousness to live in a post-amnestic state? We’ll investigate the encoding process, memory ghosts, and retrieval cues in order to write poetic anti-narratives as agents of anamnesis. Authors explored, include Schacter, Cha and Fleisher.

Brad O’Sullivan
Type is dead: Long live type.
Are we constrained by language? More specifically, are we constrained by the visual signifiers of language? In its limitations, hand-set type can liberate expression. We’ll wrestle with design and intent, with form and ego, with paper, ink, type and with the printing press. We’ll play the role of typographer, editor, designer. Translator. Mechanic. Imaginer. Above all, we’ll discover the exquisite and transformative pleasures of birthing a text entirely by hand.

Elizabeth Robinson
Reverie and Dream
This class will consider the form that the dream can take: contemplation, aspiration or even “involuntary vision.” Readings will come from the likes of Barbara Guest, Gaston Bachelard, Martin Luther King, Jr., and dream symbol dictionaries. We will wrestle with individual and communal imaginations of the “other” as we write through and into the varying pulses of the dream.

Martha Ronk
Landscape and memory
Written landscape is often associated with self-consciousness as it leads both to inwardness of memory and to critique of desecration. We will focus on landscape—itself open to both straightforward and surreal definitions—as the place for such probing, as the place of memory, bafflements, the self-emblematized/turned inside-out. Attention will be paid to the interconnection of landscape (real or imagined) and memory (often fictionalized), to the transitory and to the function of poetic opacity.

Sonia Sanchez
From Haiku to the Blues
Class cancelled. A replacement workshop will be announced soon.

Leslie Scalapino
In Phenomenal Space
We’ll concentrate on writing as (itself being) a phenomenal space, writing making a conceptual space/shape that’s both its own (reading) and imitation of outside world, land, sky, water being affected by the social world—being in these. We’ll read poems by poets such as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Michael McClure.

Eleni Sikelianos
Bestiaries
Drawing on the human urge to collect, keep or connect to other animals, we will construct bestiaries, menageries, and zoos. As human animals, we’ll employ techniques of netting, hunting, hounding, and stalking the poem; conversely, we may build structures based on the architectural accomplishments of non-human animals: webs, nests, burrows. Authors and works we’ll look to as hunting grounds: Giorgio Agamben’s The Open, Alice Notley, Marianne Moore, Anne Waldman, Lisa Jarnot and more.

Karen Tei Yamashita
Traveling the Narrative Voice
Examination of the narrative voice in fiction as oral history, memory, genre, character, style, performance, ethnicity, gender, translation, psyche, symbol, rhythm, aesthetic, experiment, puzzle, play, persona . . . Who is telling the story and how, as the author, do you create, control, manipulate, direct the telling voice? How does the creation and choice of voice facilitate and create the story? Where does the voice come from, and how does the author hide/lurk or disappear behind that voice?

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

site map contact staff faculty employment