<current workshops>
MIS-TRANSLATION
with Rudi Burkhardt, Elin McCready and Marie Beckmann.
Hosted by Anorak.
This generative writing workshop gestures outward from the “necessary failure” in the act of translation, taking cues from translation theory, conceptual writing practices, drag, and poetic ekphrasis in order to move beyond the consideration of translation as a purely semantic process. We will develop together, in defiance, an activated, unlawful space of translation that includes “writing” and “reading,” which does not demand perfection, servility, mastery nor fidelity. We’ll play and discard the metaphors and methods for translation and dabble in mistranslation. Participants should come prepared with a text or a short series of texts which they would like to translate. Participants need not have “mastered” fluency of the original language of their chosen text; rather, a general familiarity and desire for intimacy with it will do. Our classroom language will be English, and we will primarily focus on translating our texts into English.
<past workshops>
MATERIAL DOCUMENT
How can a poem be a document? Or, is a collection of poetry an archive of the real? This workshop- and reading- group will build on the practice of writing and reading poetry through an exploration of contemporary poetic (documentary, speculative) practices. If language is the material of writing, we will read and write with an attention to how this material is sculpted, folded, plucked, crumpled, erased and sung. We will translate objects into language, and language into objects. Through in-class and out-of-class writing prompts, we will engage prolifically in both ‘process- and ‘project-based’ orientations towards our writing. Considering the poet as sculptor, collector, censor, documentarian, translator, archaeologist, and psychic, we will determine what the act of writing symbolizes for ourselves; we will attend to the properties of our emerging materials and methods. By the end of this course, students will have 'written' a short collection of poetry that pulls from physical material, archives and/or surroundings as matter for potentization.
ERROR (WAHT ERWRO?)
This workshop will be an exorcism of self-doubt. This generative, prompt-driven, “experimental,” 6-session “poetry workshop” will breed the semi-perfect conditions for embracing the errors, problems, mistakes, glitches, forgetting, glitches, mistakes, redundancies and “failures” of writing poetry. In ecstatic release from conventional praises of technique and the (illegitimate) laws of craft/truth/vulnerability/authenticity/control, we’ll take error as our starting point and our process, in order to see if failure can drop us into the splash zone of bliss, i.e., the spectacle of disturbance, i.e., poetry (?). We will practice (mis)translation, forgetting, blurbs and nonsense, among other writing acts. And yes, we’ll write poems and workshop some of them. We will (re-)shape our own technical values of poetics through play and ritual. We will push up and out of our comfort valleys. In short, we will do badly/goodly, together. The reading list for this course may include works by Vi Khi Nao, Jack Spicer, Valerie Hsiung, Leslie Scalapino, Anne Tardos, Friederike Mayröcker, Zan de Parry and Hannah Wiener. We may or may not read some Ryan Trecartin, reality TV scripts and manifestos.
VERSIONS OF
In this cumulative poetry workshop, participants will write and rewrite the same poem every day for a month. Repetition will be gravitational as process, tactic and physics of textual production. We’ll read and discuss a few authors whose obsessions are distinct, and/or whose books revolve around a singular subject-axis, and/or who have published their edits and revisions of the same poem, and/or versions of one poem rewritten or taken as the subject of a new poem and/or subjected to mockery by different poets. Poets should come to workshop with a poem of their own that they are interested in rewriting, translating, debasing, fan-servicing, ablating, satirizing, corrupting, freeing, burying, sacrificing, kissing, elevating, burning, analyzing, bathing, stabilizing, binging, erasing and/or dirtying.
PATTERN CONSTRAIN PROCEED is an online month-long poetry workshop in which participants develop a variety of poetic forms based on real life patterns, algorithms and procedures. We will read from the procedural issue of CHAIN journal (1997) and from others who use formal constraint as a method of poetic production. Together we will consider how patterns, textures and forms of materiality or immateriality (in art, music, life, science, mathematics, etc) can be applied to linguistic structures and used to generate meaning(s) outside of semantic definition. We will workshop each other’s work and generate writing in and outside of the classroom. Participants should come to the first class with a form, pattern or algorithm they are interested in. Note that this course is oriented toward process over product. Participants do not need any prior experience of writing poetry to attend.