Week Three Courses

Noncredit Course #: WRI 053; tuition: $400 per week
BA Course #: WRI 353; undergraduate tuition (1.5 credits): TBA
MFA Course #: WRI 653; graduate tuition (2 credits): TBA

This week we’ll explore poetics and writing that cross borders to other languages and experiences, including Native American, Asian, South and Central American, European and our own backyard. We’ll investigate the way writers have worked with the translation and preservation of various modes of prosody and cultural form. Consider the struggles of writers under difficult political regimes (including the US of A), and how the poet and writer is a kind of “antennae”—a conscience and dreamer whose ways are often below the radar of the addictive consumer reality of the status quo. What is the value of what we do as artists, and how far does it extend and inter-connect across many different kinds of borders?

Sherwin Bitsui
The Strategy Within
We'll explore some examples from contemporary Navajo poets in order to experience the possible underlying strategies that occur in Navajo thought and philosophy. We'll see how these poets may be "resonating Navajo through English" by paying attention to nuances within their poems and collective thought that may provide a counter weight to previously existing type. We will draw upon these models to explore ways in which our own poetic and linguistic strategies may serve or sustain our intent.

Tisa Bryant
Sing the Holes: Research, Writing, and Reconnaissance
Inspired by the writers featured in Paul Naylor’s Poetic Investigations, this course urges students to create new poetic forms that locate and address the holes in our various (un)official histories. Using research and dreamwork, we’ll transliterate obscured languages, connect seemingly disparate ancestries, evolve narratives threatened with erasure and ask radical questions of literary and cultural traditions.

Mónica de la Torre
Action Poets of Latin America
Hora Zero (Peru), Tropicalismo (Brazil), Infrarrealismo (Mexico), Colectivo Acciones de Arte (Chile) are some of the movements founded in the 60's and 70's amidst the brutal dictatorships of 20th-century Latin America. We'll examine poets including Waly Salomão, Diamela Eltit, Arturo Carrera, and Roberto Bolaño, and consider how conceptual poetry and activism can be reconciled today. Spanish reading ability required. Class discussion will be in English.

George Evans
War and its Politics
War is changing the world again, and responding to it, which we must, infuses creative writing with energy, historical context and realities specific to a writer’s time and culture, but how to avoid being simply rhetorical or clichéd is a challenge. We’ll explore methods of responding to war and the politics of it by reading poetry and brief prose passages from the US, Viet Nam, Europe and Latin America, discuss why and how they work and use the workshop to generate topics, create and share new work and experiment with ways to charge our writing with new energy. Open to all genres.

Indira Ganesan
Stories in Transit
Narrative prose asks the reader to step inside the tale, and travel towards a path lovingly illuminated by the writer. The result should be a refreshing experience for both. We’ll look at what makes up the tale, and how the outriders hooked us in to look at the narrative drive with passion, wit and honesty. We’ll look at works by these writers who paid attention to the line, to the story, to the drive.

C. S. Giscombe
Experiments in Traveling, Thinking, & Writing
The idea is that travel is complex, a redefining event. We’ll both structure and break down aspects of traveling—between places, between and among communities, tribes and nations, across the page, across genres. We’ll look at texts (by Basho, Audre Lorde, Michael Ondaatje and others) that talk back to big culture and to form; we’ll make poems and prose riffs that do not shy away from encounters with the border.

Allison Hedge Coke
Cultural Duty
This is an active workshop dedicated to purposeful writing and literary activism. Poetry and prose inclusive. The essence of cultural sensibility is easily detected within the parameters of meaningful engagement, relative to inherent and learned passions of living. This workshop provides space, place and keys to motivate and incorporate what we do with the artistic vehicle with which we so choose to maneuver.

Pavla Jonssonová
Toward a Minor Literature: Bohemians like Us
This class will use the theories of Deleuze and Guattari about the revolutionary potential of “minor literature,” exploring Czech/Bohemian literature, its roots, rhizomes and transformations until now. We’ll read legends, ballads, social poetry and observe their survival/preservation in contemporary Czech culture. Works of critics of totalitarian regimes such as, Havel, Kundera and Zizek, will be discussed.

Myung Mi Kim
Trans[l]itive Mediations
We’ll address a poetics of attempt, approximation, contingency—writing that negotiates the conjunctural, chiasmatic and transitive. We’ll read poets who problematize the transnational, transcultural and translingual in an attempt to animate this question: how does your daily life connect you to (or disrupt you from) a reading of yourself as a historical subject? We’ll find a way to tend the ruptured and multiply to attenuated ethno-national, personal and linguistic displacements/conjunctions that characterize “coming into speech” in this particular cultural moment.

Wang Ping
Fragments and Collages: Writing of Interwoven Genres
We’ll explore the possibility of taking fragments of mixed genres and turning what seems trivial, personal, fragmented and chaotic into a collaged prose. Works by American and international writers will be read and discussed. Discussion will be focused on how the forms and contents come together and work for each other to make the piece work. The goal is to find the right shape, voice and rhythm for your raw materials and to transform them into art.

Jaime Robles
CLASS TITLE TK
The goal of most writing is to create a book, but while writers are very aware of compositional elements of writing, few realize how printing and the book as physical process and object affect the act of writing. Even fewer writers use these physical processes as a form of translation for what and how they write. In this class we will explore the interaction between writing, printing and the bookform.

Heriberto Yépez
Course Title TK
We often discuss issues of imperialism in relation to others. In this class we’ll instead focus our discussion on how imperialism runs through out our own writing—going beyond current notions of bipartisan mapping in the U.S. and Latin America. (Mainstream vs. experimental, counter-culture vs. official, for example). We will begin by examining our methods of evading the role of imperialism in writing and rethinking what “imperialism” means, and then move on to how to really write beyond “empire.”

Anne Waldman
Rogue State Poetics
“I’m in a rogue state, Bushie/Don’t tell me what to do/Your rules aren’t my rules/’cause I’m the lady of Misrule”
Do progressive/experimental artists and poets disarm, thwart or negotiate their “outrider” tendencies? How to channel passion, rage, intellect into powerful “high energy constructs” that obviate and delight the grammar of imagination and fight the “extraordinary rendition” of bodies, language, creativity. How to “mind” one’s war-addled culture, lineage, community, ecology, gender as a cultural intervention in the writing and the discourse. And the performance of ideas! We will look at texts of Amiri Baraka, Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Akilah Oliver, Erika Hunt, kari edwards and others for inspiration and possibility. We will write a polyvalent investigative performance collaboration crossing cultural and privatization boundaries.

Daisy Zamora
Carriers of the Word
In ancient Mesoamerica, poets were trusted “carriers of the word,” the ones who spoke directly to the people, who listened because poetry helped them understand the world. Considered the most sacred of arts, poetry communicated information about all aspects of existence, guiding people to an understanding of culture, traditions, religion, the role of individuals in society and life itself. Throughout contemporary Latin America, poetry (though different in nature and presentation now) thrives in a direct line from the ancients, and in this workshop we’ll read examples from a wide range of Latin American poets, and concentrate on creating new poetry as modern carriers of the word.

Special Guest Reading: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

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