Our fall workshops have been announced and are now open for enrollment. If interested, please register using the links below. Recently we experienced some technical difficulties with our online workshop sign-up forms (as in submitted forms were not making it to our inbox!). If you registered online for a fall Poetry Project workshop and have not heard back from us, please email Nicole at info@poetryproject.org, otherwise our online registration forms are back up and running!
Poem as Process, Procedure, Prosthesis — erica kaufman
Tuesdays 7-9PM: 10 sessions begin October 2nd
This workshop will begin by exploring “the writing process” and the ways in which writing is a practice of discovery, a practice that revels in the unfinished and incorrect, the risky and redemptive, the automatic and the adversarial. After probing and pushing our own processes, we will move into the realm of chance and procedure– writing against, over, and through our own impulses —virtual, animal, cyborgian, internalized, prosthetic. This workshop will play with the idea of the “prosthesis” as an “addition”–a way to flesh out and challenge our process through the use of form, ritual, exercise, and experiment. We’ll read from and work with texts by: Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, John Coletti, Gertrude Stein, CAConrad, Glenn Ligon, Leslie Scalapino, and others. erica kaufman is the author of censory impulse. She teaches at Baruch College and is a faculty associate of Bard College’s Institute for Writing & Thinking.
BAROQUEIFY! — Nada Gordon
Fridays 7-9PM: 10 sessions begin October 5th
What if more actually is more? How can we create writing that is more sumptuous, more intense, more curvaceous, more elegant, more obscure, more grotesque, and more beautiful? Let’s traverse the ornate forms of the baroque in pursuit of a more intensely ornamental language. Using others’ texts as starting points, we will supplement, enhance, copy, modify, twist, mangle, and decorate words, syntax, structures, tropes, and concepts to maximize sublime bewilderment. We will read some essays on theories of ornament (and anti-ornament) to inform our investigations. Writers whose works we will explore may include Rabelais, Donne, M. Cavendish, Loy, Huysmans, O’Hara, Koch, and Coolidge, as well as Stacy Doris, Lisa Robertson, Brandon Brown, Adeena Karasick, Dana Ward, Corina Copp, Julian Brolaski, Charles Bernstein, and Julie Patton. “Nonpoetic” sources for poem construction will be encouraged. Not a traditional “poetry workshop,” Baroqueify! will mainly focus on analysis, discussion, and reverse-engineering of texts by others, as well as mindcurling writing exercises. Our seminar will conclude with work on performance strategies to enhance the baroque sensibilities of the writing. Come decorate this fucked-up world with me! Nada Gordon is the author of Scented Rushes, Folly, V. Imp, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, foriegnn bodie, and Swoon. She has blogged for nearly ten years at ululate.blogspot.com, the initiatory sentence of which reads, “The impulse to decorate is, as always, very strong.”
Poetry Lab: What Can a Poem Be? — Todd Colby
Saturdays 2-4PM: 10 sessions begin October 6th
What can a poem be? We’ll attempt to answer this question while creating new modes and forms of poetry just outside the dominant culture. In this class we’ll create a safe place to take chances, to openly speculate and participate in the ongoing dialogue that ensues. There will be weekly experiments and assignments and a lot of in-class writing. We’ll tumble together through collaborations and mutual innovations. We’ll explore poetry through play, joy, openness, immediacy, profound ideologies, music, and art. We’ll take risks that allow us to reinvent ourselves as poets every time we sit down to write. We’ll create poems that don’t resemble or sound like poems; all the while being totally committed to the idea of broadening the borders of the possibilities of poetry. We’ll leap off a platform constructed by Henri Michaux, Reggie Watts, Djuna Barnes, Bill Knott, Fernando Pessoa, Hannah Weiner, E.M. Cioran, Ben Marcus, Gertrude Stein, Andy Kaufman, Sei Shonagon, Joe Brainard, Walter Benjamin, Diane Williams, and more. Todd Colby is the author of four books of poetry published by Soft Skull Press. He keeps a blog at gleefarm.blogspot.com.