Event Type
This workshop invites participants to explore together examples of public poetry: poetry meant for contexts beyond the book and outside the sanctioned reading space. This workshop will amass criteria for what makes effective and affective public poetry under today’s unique socio-political conditions by analyzing examples such as the Situantionists’ 1968 graffiti slogans and “guerrilla poetry” from the Bush-era (PIPA, PACE, The Agit-Truth Collective, and Sidewalk Blogger). The scope of the workshop will take us to the present with the work of Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha and his Edward Said Public Library as well as responses in the West to the Gaza genocide, such as NYC subway-ad détournement and Jewish Voice for Peace image creation. Participants will be invited to take part in producing poetic language—slogans, aphorisms, dictums, micropoems, etc.—to share in spaces beyond the workshop where poetry is not typically encountered, troubling the category of what a poem is. Participants will have the opportunity to public-ize some of that work during and after the workshop.
