This workshop will begin with two BIPOC writers discussing the overt and covert intertextual links between poetry (and by extension, written language) as a form of music, and music (and by extension, all sound) as a form of poetry.
We will define and then write “free”sonnets after studying the traditional sonnet forms known as the Shakespearean and the Petrachan. In this two hour workshop, we will write the first draft of a "free" sonnet.
Anaïs Nin wrote, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Join Jack Bedell and M.A. Nicholson for a generative workshop exploring how the poetic process begins with enthusiastic engagement with the world—careful observation, provocative questioning, dialogue, and the creation and study of archives—and continues to grow to fruition through imaginative reconfiguration, syntheses, and divisions.
In 1933 in Buenos Aires, the electrifying Spanish poet Federico García Lorca presented his famous lecture, “Play and Theory of the Duende.” The Duende, Lorca said, is a goblin—as distinct from an angel or a muse—which inhabits great art. But what is this goblin, and what business does it have with our poems? Lorca left us a few cryptic hints.
In this workshop, we’ll explore and expand the possibilities of intimacy in our writing. Lauren Berlant argues that intimacy, rather than something privatized, experienced, and cultivated in heteronormative couplings, is everywhere in circulation. It moves freely through private and public worlds and thus can show up in any number of complex, unruled encounters, inspiring not only desire, but also apathy, disgust, violence, wonder, and many other kinds of feeling.
“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.
This workshop will challenge the imagination. As a group, we will discuss the pros and cons of the nDada style of poetry, and each of us will create a poem or poems in the nDada style. nDada is a combination of a cartoon (perhaps absurd or unconventional) and a poem. The two are entirely unrelated, and often come together by pure, surrealist, chance. The cartoon is done by hand, while the poem is written with a typed font (digital or manual).
Does the world really need another sestina? Instead of just writing a new poem, wouldn’t it be great to create a whole new form or modality? In a workshop led by Christopher Shipman and Brett Evans, the poets discuss the practice of Versus-Verses poems, a new modality that by its nature attempts to dispel the impulse toward meaning-making in favor of the joy of creating, leaves the poets with zesty list poems of sorts for further poetic alchemy, and is just good fun in and of itself.
In a simple example, a line of a Versus-Verses poem could be "Fight Club v. Fan Club".
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far
from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when
it gets too far from music.
-Ezra Pound
Christopher Kurts will lead artists and poets through an exercise of call and response that explores the intersection of collage and poetry. Utilizing an expansive supply of collage materials from the Mystic Krewe of Scissors & Glue (@neworleanscollage), a collage collective in New Orleans, workshop attendees will start by making a twenty-minute collage. They will then pass their collages to the person next in order for them to write a poem inspired by or meant to juxtapose with the collage.