“Bayou Nonsense: Jazz, Design and Making Meaningless-ness”

“Bayou Nonsense: Jazz, Design and Making Meaningless-ness” is a workshop that stages the encounter of sense and nonsense, realism and surrealism. During the workshop, we will invite participants to question sense-making in poetry, specifically poets with deep relations to the Third Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and lower Appalachia. Poets we might focus on include Bob Kaufmann, Harmony Holiday, Fargo Nassim Tbakhi, Nick Flynn and others. The Gulf Coast is where much of European Surrealism first found footing in America, by way of French New Orleans and the Menil imports to Houston. The format for the workshop is as follows: after a first half of study and discussion, writers will then create their own responses to sense-making, surrealism, and nonsense. The workshop will be led by two graduate students studying poetry at the University of Houston whose practices are informed by surrealism.

This workshop on nonsense responds to the ongoing genocide in Gaza as well as other significant tragedies borne of neocolonial and neoimperial violences. We will ask workshop participants to lean into the senselessness of a senseless moment, rather than give in to the capitalist demand to make meaning and discipline artistic practices. We will discuss surrealism as the work of deconstructing and re-imagining various liberatory worlds and ideas while providing numerous examples and strategies for how to express our uncharted despair.