Poetry and the Police — Master Class with Juliana Spahr

Event Details: Monday, October 26, 2015, 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm Neighborhood Preservation Center (232 E 11th St, New York, NY 10003) 1 Session

Poetry and the Police: Is a Resistant and/or Revolution-aligned Literature Possible? Could We Create One Together? Would We Even Want To? If We Did, What Would We Do? — Master Class with Juliana Spahr

I’m imagining a somewhat rambling discussion of these issues. One in which during the first hour, we talk about some examples. I will provide a PDF in advance of this workshop that will have some recommended but not required reading. It might have some work by Cesaire, Baraka, Brooks. It might have some inaugural poems as examples of what not to do. It might have some essay by Reclus, Dalton, and others. Then out of that, in the hours after, I hope we can produce together some imaginings of some anti-state poetry institutions yet to be created. In the month after the workshop, participants will be welcome to send me a letter about these issues and about their own work and how it relates to these issues and some creative work too for me to read and I will respond with a letter back.

Juliana Spahr

Juliana Spahr edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman and the collectively funded Subpress with nineteen other people and Commune Editions with Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes. With David Buuck she wrote Army of Lovers. She has edited, with Stephanie Young, A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (Chain Links, 2011), with Joan Retallack, Poetry & Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave, 2006), and with Claudia Rankine, American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan U P, 2002). Her most recent book is That Winter the Wolf Came from Commune Editions.