Workshops

The January 2011 program will offer more workshops with more faculty!  Workshop days will consist of 2 sessions, morning and afternoon, each with 3 or 4 faculty members: 9:30am-12:30pm and 2:30pm-5:30pm.  There will be a sign-up sheet at each session. Eight person limit per workshop.


  Diane Wakoski   


During the four scheduled workshop sessions, each participant's work will be read and critiqued in the context of Creating A Personal Mythology. For further reference to this subject, you may consult in advance of the workshop with my various writings on the subject and, specifically, read the introduction to my new collection of poems, The Diamond Dog (Anhinga Press, 2010).


In each workshop session at least one poem by each participant will be discussed, focusing on use of trope and figurative language in shaping the poem, as well as the underlying myths and archetypes that the poem invokes or uses.

  Rae Armantrout:  Variation and Re-Vision

In this workshop we will take another look at the revision process, seeing it not as correction but as creative variation. As jazz musicians improvise on standard tunes to explore new musical possibilities, students will generate a set of related poems from the material produced by one writing exercise.We will begin (in the spirit of William Carlos Williams’ famous poem about the red wheelbarrow) by writing poems in response to a common object. I will bring in a collection of interesting things to get us started. Class members will respond to one another's first poems, not with formal critique, but simply by identifying what interested and excited (or troubled) them most in each piece. Based on what he/she hears, each author will produce variations on his/her original poem. You may do a minimalist version, stripping your original down to its core. Then you may do an extravagant, Baroque version, elaborating on one of the elements your fellow participants found most exciting. You may break your original piece into a group of separate but related sections to form a “serial poem.”  Etc.  By the workshop’s end, you will have not so much revised a poem as produced a suite of variations on a theme. Please bring a pen, paper, and a willingness to experiment with you to this class.


  Carolyn Forché



  Jerome Rothenberg  (3 x 1 1/2 hour Discussions)

 

1. Translation as Composition & Other Forms of Othering

A discussion of various procedures for bringing a range of other voices into the work of the poet as individual author.

2.  Ethnopoetics at the Millennium

A review of ethnopoetics four decades after its introduction into poetic theory and practice.

3.  The Anthology as Collage & Manifesto

A personal account of how the anthology can serve as an epic form of composition and as a means of transforming our ideas of poetry as such.

  Alberto Blanco (2 x 2-hour workshops)


Taller en español

Dedicaremos la sesión no a leer y analizar poemas ya escritos ni a juzgar el trabajo que los participantes hayan hecho antes, sino a realizar nuevos ejercicios de escritura a partir de un par de hipótesis de trabajo:


1. La poesía es LA OTRA FORMA de usar el lenguaje. Lo cual quiere decir, por principio de cuentas, que todos los demás géneros literarios trabajan casi siempre con una misma forma de usar el lenguaje, y que la poesía lo hace de otra manera. Casi podríamos decir que AL REVÉS.


2. La poesía es mitad imagen, mitad música y mitad poesía.  En el taller nos interesa abrir nuevas posibilidades de escritura creativa, poniendo el énfasis en el proceso más que en los resultados. Sé bien que, de cualquier forma, los resultados serán sorpendentes.

Workshop in English

We will dedicate the workshop session not to read or analyze poems already written by the participants, but to new writing exercises that will take into consideration two basic axioms:


1. Poetry is THE OTHER FORM of using language. Which means that, to begin with, prose, short stories, narratives, novels, essays, chronicles, articles, etc., almost always share a same way of using language, and that poetry uses language in a completely different way. UPSIDE DOWN.


2. Poetry is half image, half music and half poetry.
So, in this workshop, we are interested in opening new venues for creative writing, underlining the process much more than the results. In any case, I know that the results will be quite amazing.



  Jen Hofer: Stranger in a Strange Land: The Poetics and Processes of Translation


To translate is to work on the most local and the most global scale simultaneously. The tiniest punctuation mark, space on the page, turn of phrase must be attended to rigorously, lovingly. The larger ramifications in both directions (source language, target language; original writer, imagined audience) of the choices we make in language suggest far-reaching harmonics and reverberations in terms of the workings of power in language. Translation practice is a political act in literary terrain, and also provides a practical and philosophical model for how we—as writers, as artists—might approach difference with openness, curiosity, self-examination, willingness to listen.


This workshop is designed for writers who are engaged in translation projects and for writers who are interested in thinking about issues of translation as they relate to writing practices in English (i.e. non-translator writers).We will read both texts in translation and texts about translation. We will consider some of the questions that have provided the foundations for modern and contemporary theories of translation, including (but not limited to) questions of “americanization” vs. “foreignization,” “faithfulness” vs. “betrayal,” the effects of different translation choices on the target language, questions of audience and the reception of foreign texts, and the political ramifications of translation practice.We will also consider recent investigations into the poetics and politics of translation, among them: nomadic discourses and questions of “otherness,” “untranslatable” texts, translation as activist literary practice, and writing as translation.This is a hands-on workshop: please come ready to write or translate or both.


  Mark Weiss 

In this workshop we will take advantage of separation from our usual cultural and linguistic worlds to focus on poetry as a way to explore, a process that may know its beginning but needs to discover its end, or a game that invents its rules in the act of playing. We’ll be looking at and experimenting with risk-taking, the unfamiliar, the word that surprises, losing our balance and finding a new one, presuming nothing in advance. To that end we’ll begin with some de-centering exercises and some issues of translation and difference and proceed to where the workshop takes us, mindful of music in all its forms and the literal world within and around us.


  Susan Rich:  Speaking Pictures: A Poetry Workshop

“Look at the subject, think about it before photographing, look until it becomes alive and looks back into you.”  —Edward Steichen

This will be a writing workshop focused on ekphrasis, poems written about visual art. Famous models of the form by such poets as Rilke, Robert Hayden, and Lisel Mueller will be examined as well as many contemporary examples. Participants will sharpen their powers of observation and try their hand at writing poems based on a vast array of visual pieces.