Week Three Courses

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Week Three Workshops & Faculty

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Week Three: June 29–July 5
Polyvalent/Rhizomic Identities

The rhizome is a tuber system that moves horizontally and shares a paradigm with the Indra's net and the World Wide Web. We are all polyvalent hybrids, capable of moving in multiple directions simultaneously. On a genetic level we are composed of dominant and recessive genes. How does this translate in our writing and in our work as writers? Walt Whitman contained multitudes.
From another point of view, we are all hairy bags of water. We also bring very particular languages and cultures to our own work individually and in collaboration, such as engagement with projects of translation. There is tremendous cross-cultural fertilization going on in the contemporary literary scene. How does one identity serve another? We will welcome faculty this week from China, Yugoslavia, Mexico, the Caribbean and indigenous Native America. We'll honor the brilliant scholarship and vital translations that Clayton Eshleman has done of Peruvian poet César Vallejo.

Noncredit Course #: WRI 053, tuition: $475 per week
BA Course #: WRI 453, tuition: TBA
MFA Course #: WRI 753, tuition: TBA

Sherwin Bitsui Shifting Modalities

Diné dynamism: action and movement give force and meaning to form, structure, archetype, and bring about conceptual naming in resulting Navajo language. A poem/song may affect the modalities of perception and bring transformation to place and beingness. We will examine various texts regarding this notion of dynamic activity in the Navajo universe and attempt to create a selection of poetic work that operates as transformative/figurative agency of such force.

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. A graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts, he is the recipient of many awards including a 2006 Whiting Writers' Award. His first book is Shapeshift, and his work has appeared in American Poet, Iowa Review, To Topos: Poetry International, and Lit.

Bei Dao 20th Century International Poetry

The course objective is to deepen the students understanding of poetic language through poetry writing and close readings of selected 20th century masterpieces.

Bei Dao, born in Beijing in 1949. His work translated into thirty languages, including five poetry volumes in English (all from New Directions): Unlock (2000), Landscape Over Zero (1996), Forms of Distance (1994), Old Snow (1992), The August Sleepwalker (New Directions, 1990), the collection of stories, Waves (1990), the collections of essays, Midnight's Gate (2005) and Blue House (Zephyr Press, 2000).

Shari DeGraw A Single Sheet - The Broadside

On the first day of class, we will print an exquisite corpse text to demonstrate how to make a simple book and how to use and care for the studio's printing equipment. During the following days, participants will learn to design and print their own broadside editions. We will learn how to set lead type by hand, how to layout a broadside, and how to include artwork. Be thinking of a small text you would like to print.

Shari DeGraw publishes literary-fine-press editions under her imprint Empyrean Press in Iowa City. She has taught letterpress printing in the book arts programs at the University of Iowa and the University of Alabama. Her work is exhibited nationally and is collected by major libraries in the U.S. She also does designs work for La Presse, Black Square Editions and The Brooklyn Rail.

Clayton Eshleman Rhizomic Poetics

We will investigate, in a few model poems, and in student poems, metaphor as a rhizomic device
in the poem to enlarge the grounds that the consciousness and the subconsciousness of the
poet explore.

Suggested Reading:
Clayton Eshleman, The Grindstone of Rapport (Black Widow Press)
César Vallejo, The Complete Poetry (University of California Press)
Aime Cesaire, The Collected Poetry (University of California Press)

Clayton Eshleman is the author of Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (the culmination of a 25 year project on the origins of image-making via the Ice Age painted caves of southwestern France), The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader (a 40 year overview of his poetry, prose, and translations), and the translator of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo with a Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa. He is the former founder and editor of Caterpillar and Sulfur magazines, and has also translated Aime Cesaire, Antonin Artaud, and Michel Deguy. He is Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, where he continues to live with his wife Caryl.

Gloria Frym Exploring Eden

Exploratory from Latin and Middle English roots, denotes 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 encountered what one had not experienced before? Words are generally known entities, yet the way words are put together (or dismantled) as language may not have a name yet. So, we could well 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? A short reader will be required.

Gloria Frym has a chapbook, The Lost Sappho Poems, from Effing Press in Austin, Texas. Her most recent book of poems is Solution Simulacra (United Artists, 2006). A previous collection, Homeless at Home (Creative Arts Book Company), won an American Book Award in 2002. She is also the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories—Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)—as well as several other volumes of poetry. She is Associate Professor of Writing & Literature at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area.

Mark McMorris Fragment & Series = Poetry

A fragment is incomplete, a piece broken off, a sign of mutilation. Open rather than closed, it poses a question instead of giving an answer. How can a fragment be accurate? How do fragments make a series and cohere in the play of continuity and discontinuity? Let us read texts from the archive to probe these questions, Sappho, Mallarmé, Pound, Creeley, Grenier, Albiach, Scalapino, Howe, and others. We will read and write poems, and share poems with one another, and try to see what of value the fragment allows, and occludes, for our own writing practices today.

Mark McMorris is a poet and critic who was born in Jamaica. His books include The Blaze of the Poui (2003), a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize; and The Black Reeds (1997), winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series prize from the University of Georgia Press. The Café at Light, a text of lyric dialogue, appeared in 2004 from Roof Books. His essays on poetry and poetics have appeared in such venues as Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary; Xcp: Crosscultural Poetics; Tripwire; and The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, writer in residence at Brown University, and Roberta C. Holloway Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently associate professor of English and director of Lannan Literary Programs at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC.

Semezdin Mehmedinovic Identity in the Languages of Politics and Literature

In this course, we will examine how politics and literature have opposite approaches towards identity of the individual and collective. How does literature behave towards individual identity? How do political ideologies behave towards individual identity? How do authors who do not belong to one national or religious identity, but belong to different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, describe their own polyvalent identity?

Semezdin Mehmedinovic ( Bosnia, 1960) published several book of poetry, two of them are translated in English (Sarajevo Blues, Citylights, 1998; and Nine Alexandrias, Citylights, 2003). Lives in the U.S. since 1996.

Leonard Schwartz Responsibility as The Ability To Respond: Poem As Dialogue

Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggests that the very presence of language implies the being of an other; therefore, language itself implies responsibility. Now, both Cage and Duncan assert that what the term "responsibility" really means is "the ability to respond." Language of course is a polyvalent hybrid, capable of moving in multiple directions simultaneously; when we speak one language we are actually speaking many and when we write a poem it addresses both the singular and a multiplicity of reverberations. How work on our writing practice as to maximize all these tendrils? Through both writing and reading exercises this class will explore the free play of writing and of speech as each responds to the presence of an other—goddess, human, animal, text.

Required Reading:
Robert Duncan, Groundwork II (New Directions)

Suggested Reading:
Leonard Schwartz, Language as Responsibility (Tinfish)

Leonard Schwartz is the author of numerous books of poetry, including A Message Back And Other Furors (Chax Press), The Tower Of Diverse Shores (Talisman House), Language As Responsibility (Tinfish Editions) and The Library Of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse). Schwartz also hosts the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, archived online at Pennsound. He teaches poetics at The Evergreen State College in Washington, and has read from his work all over the world.

Christopher Stackhouse Memetics and Concept Distribution: The Poet as The
Artist's Artist

In Memetics and Concept Distribution: The Poet as The Artist's Artist, we will study and discuss (re)distribution, iteration and development of concepts and habits that are congruent or intersect in reading and writing text, and, making and looking at art. Perhaps there are limited ways of producing works of art, be they written or fashioned from three-dimensional materials. We will investigate the dynamic possibilities of perception and language used by poets to describe cognitive and emotional responses to literary and non-literary artistic production.

Required Text:
John Keene & Christopher Stackhouse, Seismosis (1913 Press)

Suggested Reading:
Barbara Jordan, Trace Elements (Penguin)
Paul Shepard, The Only World We've Got (Sierra Club Books)

Christopher Stackhouse is the author of Slip (Corollary Press, 2005); is co-author of Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), a collaboration with writer/professor John Keene (Northwestern University), that features Stackhouse's drawings in dialogue with Keene's text. He holds and MFA in Writing/Interdisciplinary Studies from Bard College. He is a Cave Canem Writers Fellow. He is a 2005 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for The Arts. His essay " Everyone's Own Color Red" that compares the poetry of Hart Crane and Bob Kaufman, was published in the Spring 2008 issue of American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets. In September
2008 for the new curator program New Voices, New York @ Chashama's ABC Gallery in New York City, he co-curated with artist/curators Kelly Kivland and Alisoun Meehan, the group exhibition titled Contranym that featured mixed media work of artists Robert Delford Brown, Victoria Fu, Brian Kim Stefans, John Cage, and Stephanie Loveless. He co-hosts and coordinates Readings at Max Protetch Gallery with poet/assistant gallery director Stuart Krimko in New York City. Currently completing a manuscript of poetry, while also doing research for the development of a nonfiction book on poetics, Stackhouse lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Truong Tran Beyond The Surface

We will consider the environment as a place for experimentation, a laboratory of sorts. Through a combination of readings and focused writing exercises, you will sharpen your skills as a writer and reader of poetry. By course-end, you will have a substantial body of work, a honed poetic voice, and a variety of tools towards your development as a working poet. We will engage in conversation about various texts containing polyvalent identities, including Commons (Mi Kim), Sleeping with the Dictionary (Mullen), From The Book To The Book (Jabes), and The Granite Pail (Niedecker).

Truong Tran is a poet and visual artist. His publications include The Book of Perceptions (Kiriyama Book Prize finalist), Placing The Accents (Western States Book Prize finalist), Dust and Conscience (SFSU Poetry Center Book Prize winner), Within the Margin, and Four Letter Words. Truong lives in San Francisco and currently teaches poetry at San Francisco State University and Mills College.

Lewis Warsh Writing through the Eyes of Another

How can we imagine characters who are the opposite genders as ourselves? Although Gustav Flaubert exclaimed "Je suis Madame Bovary" how close did he come to getting into the head and heart of a woman? The workshop will focus on how we write about what we don't know—not only regarding gender, but class and ethnicity as well. Writing assignments will point towards the secret lives of characters. As much time as possible will be spent reading and discussing our work.

Suggested Reading:
Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth (New Directions)
Marguerite Duras. The Lover (Pantheon)
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (FSG)

Lewis Warsh's most recent books are Inseparable: Poems 1995–2005 (Granary Books), The Origin of the World (Creative Arts), Money Under the Table (Trip Street Books) and Touch of the Whip (Singing Horse). He is coeditor of The Angel Hair Anthology, editor and publisher of United Artists Books, and director of the MFA Program in creative writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn.

Zhang Er Where Canon is Fluid: Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Rhizomatic growth perhaps describes the contemporary Chinese poetry scene, in which the canon of Classical poetry surrenders some of its vitality and the poetic landscape shifts with each passing day. The soil of the Chinese language has inevitably changed with its exposure to the outside world. How do these changes affect the roots and shoots of the 'new poetry'? Through translation, this class will examine the interconnections between the poetics of contemporary Chinese poets and their environments.

Required Reading:
Zhang Er and Chen Dongdong, Another Kind of Nation: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Talisman House)

Zhang Er, born in Beijing, is the author of three collections of poetry in Chinese, most recently Because of Mountain. She has six chapbooks in English translation, among them, Carved Water and Sight Progress. Her selected poems in two bilingual collections, So Translating Rivers and Cities (2007) and Verses on Bird (2004) are from Zephyr Press. She co-edited the bilingual volume Another Kind of Nation: an Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Talisman House Publishers (2007). She currently teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.

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