Week Two Courses

These phrases, echoing back to the titles of Goethe’s famous novella and Huysmans’s novel of dissipation, stem from the tendency of chemical species to combine with certain substances of species in preference to others. How do our social, ethical, political, cultural, emotional affinities combine or dissolve, how do we register as a subterranean “force” in our work as writers, artists, thinkers? Is what we write relevant and how? How do we enter and challenge the mainstream linguistically and culturally with our unpredictable genres and other languages? What are the social choices we have in the way we are “disobedient” or maverick, eschewing familiar tropes of careerism and advancement on the sweat of others? How do notions of utopia inspire other possibilities of community? We will hear from writers of Native American, Middle Eastern and Vietnamese backgrounds.

Noncredit Course #: WRI 051, tuition: $450 per week
BA Course #: WRI 451, tuition: $1,071 per week
MFA Course #: WRI 751, tuition: $1,452 per week

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Charles Alexander Elective Affinities and the Pleasures of Poetry and Books

What are elective affinities and how might they be found, in poems and books, and experienced as reservoirs, meadows, fields of pleasure? Can they exist in books as well, and can we create them in printed works? We will read Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, and selections from Jürgen Habermas and Walter Benjamin while we create our own elective affinity in the print shop. Not specifically a workshop in printing, we will explore some possibilities in printing small works on paper that will themselves exemplify the theme of chemical and perhaps alchemical affinity. Most of the time, the class itself will be an ongoing discussion of the week’s theme as related to our readings. How affinities we read and create can also elicit pleasure will be the elective focus of our week.

Charles Alexander thinks of making books, and in fact of walking and being, as forms of making poems. He studied at Stanford Univ. & U of Wisconsin. He directs Chax Press. His books include Hopeful Buildings (Chax Press), arc of light/ dark matter (Segue Books), Near or Random Acts (Singing Horse Press), and Certain Slants (Junction Press). He is currently working on a long poem, Pushing Water, and on a prose book about the physical pleasures of poetry. He is the former director of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, recipient of the distinguished Arizona Artist Award, and in summer 2006 was a participating poet in TAMAAS Poetry Translation Seminar in Paris, France.

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Will Alexander Language as Intuitive Ozone

We will engage a state of mind that lets one’s inner focus breathe, so as to engage with the sonar hidden in the depths of each phoneme. Because each phoneme, each word, each phrase partakes in the infinity of imaginal radiance, we will engage this radiance via the 26 letters of the English language, attempting to understand its range from the concrete to the occult. Theory will encompass the reading engaged during the course and practice will consist of the writing pursuit during the time allotted. We will look at poems and writings by Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia and others.

Author of more than twenty books, Will Alexander has written novels, plays, essays and poetry, while also immersing himself in the creation of visual works. Recent and forthcoming titles include the novel Sunrise in Armageddon, a book of essays Singing in Magnetic Hoof-beats, and a book of poems Impulse and Nothingness. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Sinan Antoon Strangers to Ourselves

How do writers position themselves in a foreign cultural landscape or, at times, a foreign language? How are homelands re-imagined and transcended? How do exilic writings negotiate and problematize nationalism and the very concept of home? Do we all, as subjects, inhabit different degrees of exile? Readings, which may include Darwish, Malouf, Cavafy and Khatibi (and writing assignments), will grapple with these themes.

Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi-born poet, novelist, and filmmaker. His writings (Arabic and English) have appeared in various journals and publications in the Arab world and the US. His books include The Baghdad Blues and I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, which The Nation called “ a gem. . .one of the essential Arab novels of its time.” Antoon returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 to co-direct/produce a documentary About Baghdad.

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Jack Collom Comedy & Nature

Henri Bergson said that what’s funny is always “something mechanically encrusted upon the living.” Also, “language is too rigid to be an accurate mirror of an infinitely fluid universe.” Sounds like a wacky combo biology and physics lecture? Historically, “The Fool” may well have begun with intoxication. And incongruity may have been first played as animal heads jammed with human bodies. This course will explore conjunctions of nature and comedy, and what to do.

Jack Collom was born 1931 in Chicago and was a birder and woodswalker from an early age. Early onto humors of language. He moved west at fifteen, attended forestry school in Colorado and USAF for four years. Collom worked in factories for twenty years, writing poetry on the side. His achievements include two NEA Fellowships, twenty-three books and chapbooks. He likes to work with kids a lot and at seventy-six, is writing more than ever. He thinks everything is funny, perhaps also very sad. His latest book is Sitiations, Sings, with Lyn Hejinian.

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Linh Dinh State of the Union

If you have something very urgent to say, you'll find a way to say it. In this poetry writing workshop, we’ll examine the real state of our union, at variance with the official one. Informed and provoked by the essays of James Howard Kunstler, Joe Bageant and Susan Sontag, etc, we’ll arrive, hopefully, at a deeper understanding of the many crises confronting America. Looking past the spins and jives, seeing behind what’s behind, we’ll deconstruct America.

Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap, four books of poems, All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts, Borderless Bodies, and Jam Alerts, with a novel, Love Like Hate, scheduled to be released in 2008. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, 2004 and 2007, and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places.

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Anselm Hollo Poet as Citizen, Citizen as Poet

We will examine some poems from the past and present that deal with the “politics” of their days. W.H. Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. Allen Ginsberg was a citizen poet, deeply concerned with the politics of his country. Mayakovsky and the Dadaists raised hell and shocked the bourgeoisie. We’ll also consider work by Alice Notley, Amiri Baraka, Edward Dorn, José Emilio Pacheco, et al, and write poem-responses to their work and to the state of the nation.

Anselm Hollo, poet and literary translator, is a professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His most recent books are Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Coffee House Press) which won the San Francisco Poetry Center's Best Book Award for 2001, and Guests of Space, also from Coffee House Press.

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Daniel Kane Fragments, Blotches & Healing Lights: The Conversation Between ‘New American’ Film and Poetry

We will explore collaborations between poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg with filmmaker peers Rudy Burckhardt, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. We’ll be guided more generally by our sense that innovative American poetry affiliated with Donald Allen’s seminal anthology The New American Poetry (1960) was informed by non-mainstream and formally experimental film of the 1950s and 60s to a greater extent than is currently recognized.

Daniel Kane was born in New York City and grew up in Manila, Mexico City, London, New Jersey and New York City. He is currently teaching American literature at the University of Sussex, Brighton, England. His publications include All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s; What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde; and, as editor and contributor, Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing After the New York School. The Conversation Between 'New American' Film and Poetry is forthcoming in 2008.

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Douglas A. Martin Form, Formalities, Fashion, and the “Fixed-Fit”

We will take four starting points—“Everyday Barf,” Eileen Myles; poems Ingeborg Bachmann wrote while the world was getting to know her as novelist; Kathy Acker’s posthumously published novella-poem/manifesto The Burning Bombing of America; and collected bits of Lorine Niedecker—keeping in our collective mind and background we’ll form: Huysmans’ character Des Esseintes, and that titular “grain,” alternately called “nature,” or even seen as “the stream.” As we write, are we in it or not?

A novelist and poet, Douglas A. Martin’s books include Your Body Figured (Nightboat), In the Time of Assignments (Soft Skull), Branwell, a novel of the Brontë brother, They Change the Subject, and the haiku year (co-author). His first novel, Outline of My Lover, was named an International Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part by the Forsythe Company for their multimedia piece, Kammer/Kammer.

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Harryette Mullen Poetry Workshop

The course description will be posted when it becomes available.

Harryette Mullen's Poems, short stories, and essyas have been published widely and reprinted in over 40 anthologies. Her poetry is included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and translated into Spanish, French, Polish, Bulgarian, and Swedish. She is the author of six poetry books, including Blues Baby and Sleeping with the Dictionary, a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA.

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Laura Mullen Elective the Grain Writerly

“We write our reading.” In S/Z, Roland Barthes claims our paths through a text shape the text, become the text. In this workshop we will remark our paths and make this theory literally our practice. Each student in the course will choose a book to “treat”—to inhabit, trouble, enhance, deny, write into or out of, shadow, sass, caress, illustrate, illuminate, play…to enter into the deepest (physical and spiritual) dialogue with: to engage…an extended response ability.

Laura Mullen teaches at Louisiana State University. She is the author of five books: The Surface; After I Was Dead; The Tales of Horror; Subject, and Murmur, and a chapbook, Turn, from dove/tail press. Her poetry has been widely anthologized and her prose has appeared in Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action, ParaSpheres and elsewhere.

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Alice Notley Inventing the Story

We will consider intersections of story and lyric/metric in this moment and out of the past, and propose answers to the question of how to construct a poetry narrative now. We will read some poems and write a lot. Students should have read my book, In the Pines.

Alice Notley's most recent books are In the Pines; Alma, or The Dead Women; and Grave of Light: New & Selected Poems 1970–2005, for which she won the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize. With Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, Notley edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. She lives and writes in Paris, France.

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Elizabeth Robinson Mystic Speech

This course constitutes an invitation to attend to the ways spirit can call or beckon, creating inexplicable insight or affinities. Readings from Simone Weil, Michel de Certeau, Frank Samperi, Lissa Wolsak and Fanny Howe will serve as candles that light the way into students’ own inquiries. Emphasis will be on listening for presences that our society frequently tells us to ignore. And then making way for our own distinct, but perhaps unanticipated responses.

Elizabeth Robinson is most recently the author of Inaudible Trumpeters. Other recent books include Apostrophe and Under That Silky Roof. Apprehend was the winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Pure Descent was a winner of the National Poetry Series. Robinson lives in Boulder, Co, and co-edits EtherDome Chapbooks and Instance Press.

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Eleni Sikelianos Non-elective Affinities (Family Histories)

There are histories we are given, ones we don’t (consciously) elect or adopt. We are born. And with this fact comes a constellation of humans, great and small. My plan for this workshop is to explore, in the least cliché terms available, the possibilities of family story, lore, and character as a focal point for research, revision, and writing. Authors we might look to for inspiration include Michael Ondaatje, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Paul Auster, Bernadette Mayer, Selah Saterstrom and Jo Ann Wasserman.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of a book about her father, The Book of Jon, and five books of poetry. A sixth book of poems, Body Clock, is forthcoming (fall 2008), as is her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges of Light. A Selected Poems recently appeared in French (De l’histoire, du soleil, de la vision, translated by Béatrice Trotignon). Sikelianos is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (1991).

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Orlando White LETT(ERRS

This workshop will focus on reinterpreting and rewriting the English alphabet from a more individually cultural perspective of one's own ethnic and/or social sensibilities. Students will explore, discuss, and question various interpretations and origins of letters and literary symbols. Class participants will create original works, using various creative writing exercises. Students will be encouraged to focus on concrete imagery and silence and space of line ultimately to effectively convey a sense of one's own poetic perspective via lingual approach, poetic form, and style.

Orlando White is Diné (Navajo) from Sweetwater, Arizona. He is of the Zuni Water Edge People and born for the Mexican Clan. He received a BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and will receive an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University in May 2008. His poems have appeared in In Posse Review, Oregon Literary Review, Ploughshares, Red Ink Magazine, To Topos, 26 Magazine and Ur Vox.

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