Week Four Courses

Noncredit Course #: WRI 054; tuition: $400 per week
BA Course #: WRI 354; undergraduate tuition (1.5 credits): TBA
MFA Course #: WRI 654; graduate tuition (2 credits): TBA

What enhances the written text in performance? How are we working with and developing further exploratory strategies? What is our praxis with the Internet, film, video, radio, television? How can poets and writers change the frequency of the usual dumbed-down commercial fare that seeks to numb rather than activate the senses? What might be the role of music, gesture, dance with text? How does the painstaking attention required of setting letterpress type inform our writing or, for that matter, the “making” of books? The SWP’s final week historically honors the unique gifts of our community—our sangha, a word borrowed from the Buddhist tradition referring to a like-minded group of practitioners. This week, premier anthologist Jerome Rothenberg will be joined by special guest Jeffrey Robinson to discuss their Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three.

Bruce Andrews
Language & Method: Performance Texts & Collaborative Texts
Privileging the reader in a communal poetics—of collaborations (with other texts & poets, present & past, with choreographers, musicians or new media artists) & performance as collaboration, with social meanings as raw material. The reader of far-out forms & processes, the provoked & embodied reader, the reader tilted by ideology. Writing as editing, editing as reading: How to think. How to love. How to politicize.

Bill Berkson
Hands On
A combination seminar and workshop, this course will concentrate on the relatively new phenomenon of artist/poet hands-on collaborations, along with more traditional poet/poet kinds. We begin with how collaboration has been standard practice throughout millennia, then zero-in on modern practices: Exquisite Corpse, illustrated books, Stones by Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara and subsequent New York School (and elsewhere) elaborations—Joe Brainard’s C Comics, various types of “works” with George Schneeman, Philip Guston’s poem-pictures, “Leon” poems, Bean Spasms, ad infinitum. Some attention, too, to collaborations in film, video, dance, theater and of course words and music. Perhaps an exhibition and/or publication will result.

Abigail Child
Text and Image Seminar: “Cut-ups, Comics +Translation”
During the first century of cinema, text—in the form of titles, credits, intertitles, subtitles, rolling introductions, scenarios and screenplays—has been an inevitable part of the commercial film experience. This class looks at work that confronts the traditional use of text to create new forms. We look at historical precedents in the graphic arts of Dada and Russian constructivism, contemporary painting, drawing and populist comics. A focus is on the student producing their own ‘script’ utilizing alternative compositional strategies.

Brian Evenson
Madness and Fiction
This course examines portrayals of madness in fiction, as well as examining writing from those defined as mad, other or excluded. Is the role of the artist analogous to the role of the madman? We'll think about the thought disorders linked to varieties of madness, explore the writing and speech tendencies found among schizophrenics, examine the notion of "minor literature," and do some fiction writing of our own.

Chris Funkhouser
Creative Cannibalism and Prehistoric Digital Poetry
Spatial representation, temporal-spatial ideas and appropriative practices have always been fruitful grounds for invention in poetry. Use of intensive graphicism, automation, software, sampling and other forms of digital calculation have increasingly thrived in the past half-century. The value, characteristics, and motivations of a plausible anthropophagic lineage extending from 330 A.D. combinatorics through romanticism, symbolism, modernism, concrete, “new American” and tidalectic poetry, now reflected in Internet and multimedia compositions, are on the menu of this seminar.

Thomas Glave
Movements Between all Sorts of Music, Dance, and Text
What sorts of “stories” or “narratives” might be fashioned out of non-narrative music, such as twelve-tone music, jazz, and—closer to actual narrative—contemporary popular songs, including hip-hop? And what sorts working with music made especially for narrative films? And what might we write after viewing “plotless” dance performances in pursuit of the “story” somehow there in the images, in the movement of pliable human bodies? We will listen to music, view dance and write, and see. . .

Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Junior Burke
Creating performance text
We will examine what elements go into an effective monologue. How words on the page are transformed into effective Spoken Word. How a narrative piece is structured and ultimately delivered. By the end of the week, each writere will have a piece that has been written, re-written and polished with an eye toward performance.

Eileen Myles
What kind of poem or browser RU?
In “Personism” (written 50 years ago) Frank O’Hara basically tells how the capacity to pick up the phone amplified the possibility of writing a poem into a kind of performance of talking to you (through the means of the world). Today it’s cellphones and planes and flowers. What kind of browser is a poem, or you? I’m thinking about poetry as a state of endless connection (to inside & out). Bring stuffed bears, cameras, etc.

Camille Roy
The Inside-Out Rabbit: Bay Area Experimental Prose and Plays
Beginning with performance art of the 70's, Bay Area art practice began to re-configure the relation between artist and audience. Risk and disclosure created fugitive intimacies and new formal imperatives. Literary practice became more performative. There was a flowering of poet’s theatre. Narrative writing turned towards a self-aware and sometimes politicized vulnerability in which the reader was a partner in an open-ended investigation. Through writing, reading, discussion and workshop, this class will encounter some of the most provocative aspects of Bay Area literary practice.

Jerome Rothenberg
Translations & Transcreations, from English & Other Foreign Languages
From as far back as the Romans—as in other times & places, everywhere—translation has served poets as another and very productive form of composition. We’ll focus therefore, on the ways in which this interactive process can be used in one’s own work, with a nod to the instructor’s idea of “othering” and to Haroldo De Campos’s of “transcreation”—the reimagining or reinvention of texts from other poets. While working from a language other than English is both familiar and useful in this regard, similarly interesting results can come from the translation of one poet’s English idiolect into another’s, and that process (English to English) will be our principal focus in the present instance.

Selah Saterstrom
Workshop
Using the mode of the question as a path of inquiry and allowing the logic of divination to inform our experiments, this seminar/workshop seeks to engage with the parabolic and mysterious in the idioms of parable and mystery. By infesting our engagements with visual representations and by performing public acts of writing, we will explore the page as an installation space and wonder what it is that binds a book. Artist Noah Saterstrom will also join us on occasion to collaborate.

Julia Seko
Paper, Ink and Lead: The Material Word
Printing presents words in concrete form; something to be held, felt, read. In this introductory letterpress workshop, we will use metal type, paper, ink and big machines to explore this transformation and the resultant relationship between the text and its visual and tactile manifestation in print.

Mac Wellman
A Play Writing Workshop
Two of the four classes will be a series of linked exercises involving listening, transcribing and editing; the first class will be an introductory session; the last class a summary and a talk on professional issues.

Special Guest Lecture: Jeffrey Robinson (with Jerome Rothenberg)

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