2013 Workshop Program
Anselm Berrigan - Information Overload as InspirationThe idea here will be to read and write poems that are or may be deemed intrusively messy vis-à-vis their relationship to information (content, facts, details, amusements, lies, statistics, concepts, their opposites, documents, oral histories, emotional rubbish, questionable memories, cries, shots in the dark, and all other detritus of the classical, contemporary, post-brain, idiosyncratic mind). Rigorous attention to detail expected, as well as a completely open mind as to what can go into a poem on literal, tonal and formal levels, to name a few. Inspiration may include being agitated, provoked, and/or horrified into writing, to go along with traditional, personal and other illogical notions of inspiration as well as anti-inspiration.
Nicole CooleyOutside Material
Our focus in this poetry workshop will be on “outside material” and how it can be used in our poems. We will talk about writing poems from material outside ourselves and how that material might lead us back to ourselves. We will explore archival sources, poems as social and personal documents, the relationship between research and writing, found poems, and poetic collaborations. In addition to traditional workshops, we will practice targeted workshops, where we look at particular issues of poetics that are engaged by everyone’s poems (for instance, titles, closure, lineation).
Lynn Emanuel- News From The Old
Through in-class writing prompts and working with poems from workshop members, we will explore a variety of ways for generating new work from older or current drafts. In other words, we will be concerning ourselves with what we can make out of what we already have. I will ask you to imagine the individual poems and pages you bring with you to our workshop to be part of a larger unit of expression and exploration, a larger unit of work—say, the beginning of a book or a poetic sequence. What can you discover about your work from this enabling fiction? If you want to take this workshop you should be prepared to provide copies of a poem to me and your fellow poets.
Tom SleighTransformation as Imitation
I remember talking to a friend who felt he was stuck in his work. He repeated Rilke's little dictum, "You must change your life," as if by changing his life he could change his poetry. When I told this to another friend, he said, "You know, he doesn't need to change his life. He just needs to change his line length."Another friend once told me an outrageous story about inadvertently running guns for the CIA. When I asked her if she'd ever written about it, she said, "It's tempting. But it's not my material."Robert Frost once said that in writing a poem, you start with an emotion, an emotion finds a thought, and a thought finds a word. But that presumes a certain orientation toward language: what would happen if you started from a word?All three of these stories are stories about conventions: conventions about the self, about the relationship between life and art, about the process of writing poems. By looking at four exemplary poets who write in different ways, and by identifying the conventions they write out of, we'll use imitation as a way to transform the way we write—not by sounding like the poets we read, but by experimenting in our own work with different kinds of syntax and line, modes of descriptive and figurative language, music and voicing.We'll also attempt to identify areas of experience that your own poems suggest and that you might go more deeply into once your back home and writing on your own. Please bring two of your own poems for us to discuss, though we can also talk about some of the new work you produce during the course of the workshop.
Suzanne Jill LevineTranslation Workshop: The Subversive Scribe
See website for reviews of work/philosophy of translation: http://tinyurl.com/JillLevineRecommended books for the workshop (both inexpensive paperbacks): A. Jorge Luis Borges, On Writing, Penguin paperback classics, 2010. B. Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009 [also in Spanish, published by Fondo de Cultura Economica: they are planning to bring out a second edition].
1. Translation: a "more advanced stage": A discussion of the poetics of translation and approach to translation as a creative and critical act through readings of some essays and a "ficcion" by Jorge Luis Borges. As translator/editor of Penguin's recent editions of Borges' poetry and essays, I will lead the group in discussing not only Borges' poetics of writing and translating but also engage the students in practicing translation in order to explore the challenges of Borges' prose and poetry.
- 2.
The Subversive Scribe: Discussing my work with other major Latin
American writers and poets, particularly the concept of writing as
translation, we will focus on translation as a collaboration between
author and translator, and such challenges as wordplay, spoken language
and dialect, and culturally specific forms and literary allusions. In
this context I may also bring in poet Gabriel Magaña whose
linguistically experimental poems I am currently working on.
3. The workshop will function as a team, i.e. each student will translate either poetry or a work of fiction [brief, 3-5 pages] that he or she has already chosen, and while I will offer editorial guidance, each student will get to review actively all the translations from Spanish to English, or in the case of native Spanish speakers, English to Spanish.
Ron Silliman- Afternoon Conversations - Coming soon
2010 - Merida: Anne Waldman, Mark Doty, Pedro
Serrano, Martin Espada, Pura López Colomé, José
Vicente Anaya, Briceida
Cuevas Cob (Mayan language)
2009 - Merida: C.D. Wright, Bob Holman, Forrest Gander, Mónica de la Torre, Jack Collom, Coral Bracho, Valerie Mejer, Briceida Cuevas Cob (Mayan language)
Additionally, poet and novelist Jonathan Harrington worked with USPiM for three years with individual consultations.