STICK AROUND: Poetic Collaboration as the Determined Practice of Letting it Happen – JO ANN WASSERMAN
FRIDAYS AT 7PM / BEGINS OCTOBER 7th / 10 SESSIONS

Throughout the Poetry Project’s history collaboration has played an integral part in both the organization itself and in the work that came out of readings, workshops, friendships, love-triangles, feuds, and celebrations held within the walls of St. Mark’s Church. Economic and social conditions present in New York of the 1960s, 70s and early 80s made it comparatively easy for poets and other artists living downtown to hang out and work together on projects, but things have changed and so have the logistics of spending unstructured time with other writers and artists. In 2011 collaborations are more likely to be constructed on line than in person, proposing the inevitable question about what might be lost when we don’t work face-to-face. We will use the opportunity of this workshop as a time/space for working together using a variety of launch points including: repurposing each other’s work, collectively producing/interpreting collage, employing poetic forms, practicing telepathic collaboration, and creating collective imaginary identities. We will collaborate with each other, with ourselves, with people we will likely never meet and even with the dead. Readings will include collaborative work by: Paul Eluard, Benjamin Peret, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Joe Brainard, Kathleen Fraser, Tom Clark, Barbara Guest, “the 3:15 Experiment” (Bernadette Mayer, Lee Ann Brown, Jen Hofer, & Danika Dinsmore), Joshua Beckman, Matthew Rohrer, and “Seven Poets, Four Days, One Book” (Marvin Bell, István László Geher, Ksenia Golubovich, Simone Inguanez, Christopher Merrill, Tomaž Šalamun and Dean Young).

Jo Ann Wasserman is the author of The Escape (Futurepoem).