The Walk-in Desk Drawer: Writing from Outside In – Matvei Yankelevich
TUESDAYS 7PM / 5 SESSIONS BEGINNING FEBRUARY 7

How does one write from outside the prevailing culture? What is a private language? Where does it intersect with the universal language of our utopian desires? In this workshop, we’ll examine a few writers in isolation (political, cultural, linguistic), writers who wrote for the desk drawer, or in the margins of culture, language, or sanity. We’ll take cues from the gestural language of the outsider. We’ll commune with poetry at its outer limits as it approaches music, drawing, or cypher. We’ll practice writing that sentences itself to infamy or obscurity. Writers discussed or lurking in the desk drawer include but are not limited to: Ivan Blatny, Stéphane Mallarmé, Alexei Kruchenykh, Gabriel Pomerand, Mina Loy, Daniil Kharms, William Blake, Osip Mandelstam, Henri Michaux, Boris Poplavsky, Laura Riding, Lev Rubinstein, Alexander Vvedensky.