2025 1 May 7:00-8:15pm: The Poetry Society of New York, Workshop facilitator, The Time of a Sentence: Flash Poetic Essays
How do we experience time when we open up to language at the moment of composition? What did Joanne Kyger mean when she advised poets to not revise that language? What did Gertrude Stein mean by "composition?" What does Renee Gladman mean by “poetic time,” and how do we experience it in the sentence? How do we write timeless poetry that belongs to the contemporary moment? What does it mean to “essay” when we understand the word “essay” means “to try”? What is a "poetic idea" or "poetic evidence"? We will get together to make poetic proposals that tap into the collective mind/ spirit reflecting our time together in workshop.
2024: Bard Masters of Art in Teaching: History/ Social Studies Faculty, American Empires: Culture and Counternarratives
This course surveys North American and US political participation in settler colonialism, insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare, transatlantic slave trade, militarized statecraft, global transnational states and markets, and, finally, a range of recognized and autonomous organizations countering colonial-imperial ways of knowing the world through form, culture, theory, and action. Cultural processes of representation, communication, transmission, and knowledge production are ways in which people study and reflect on their lived realities to flourish autonomously against, in the midst of, and in the afterlives of empire. This course will highlight a range of conventional and innovative ways to engage the poetic energies of historical documents and academic writing. Which languages, terms, definitions, and usages have persisted through colonization, so to speak, to tell the tale? How do we study the “archive” ethnographically as much as they use it to extract data? What are the discursive politics of memory, prediction, and speculation including how we conceive of the past, present, and future? What are the discursive politics of place, land, oceans, borders, diaspora? What are the ecological, technological, social, political, and historical contexts complicating authorship, agency, and learning?
2024: Bard Prison Initiative, Faculty, Theory and Practice of Pedagogy
Proposal #1: Freire defines liberatory pedagogy as collaborative problem-solving through which students become “beings for themselves” rather than a good “‘fit’ for the world.” Proposal #2: Academic “writing means joining a conversation of persons who are…jointly seeking answers to shared problems that puzzle them” (Bean and Melzer). Proposal #3: “The writing process itself provides one of the best ways to help students learn the active, dialogic thinking skills valued in academic life…If one examines the evolving drafts of an expert writer, one sees the messy, recursive process of thinking itself as new ideas emerge during the drafting process” (Bean and Melzer). Proposal #4: “When enough anomalies accumulate to make a substantial number of [scholars] in the field question whether the traditional paradigm can solve many of the serious problems that face them, a few innovative thinkers will devise a new model [or] paradigm” (Maxine Hairston on Thomas Kuhn). To test these proposals about academic writing, we will study the ethics, theories, and dialogue practices of the writing tutor, and the tutor’s critical position relative to students, instructors, and academic labor.
2021-present: Bard Prison Initiative, Faculty, Grammar (year-long course in language studies)
To find a writing voice for now and to develop agency over that writing voice through regular writing practice (Matt Longabucco)
To engage multiple languages (both heritage and practical) as resources for that writing voice, whether you code-mesh intentionally or not, with cognitive flexibility and versatility (Vershawn Ashanti Young, June Jordan)
To construct sentences as a way to practice noticing and inferring meaning from what you notice (Verlyn Klinkenborg)
To study languages as alive, complex, dynamic, variant, and diverse, particularly as users re-invent and revitalize them (Anne Curzan, Michelle Devereaux and Darren Crovitz)
To study languages as storehouses and repertoires of knowledge about how to live, survive, and flourish in opposition to colonialism and racial capitalism (Diane Nelson et al, James Baldwin)
To develop some fluency with grammar terminology to be able to discuss the formal structures of your writing voice: orthography as boundaries; syntax as structure and relation; comma perception, etc
To develop agency over a writing voice by modulating the ways you “speak” (“language register”) to engage a specific situation and audience, particularly when you are “monologuing” in an essay
To consider the rhetorical power of citation, summary, paraphrasing, and dialogue to establish dynamic and meaningful relationships with other writers and speakers
To adapt or code-mesh relevant specialized vocabularies from multiple languages and discourses with flexibility and versatility
To consider the language patterns and conventions (ie, “rules”) as they are practiced by particular audiences and situations, and to develop flexibility in both upholding and innovating the language conventions and patterns in a discourse community.
2021-present: Bard College Institute for Thinking and Writing, Faculty, Language and Thinking
2023-2024: The Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, Mentor (with Sahar Khraibani)
2022: The Flow Chart Foundation’s Text Kitchen, Workshop facilitator, New Writing, New Languages
In this in-person workshop, we will embark on transdisciplinary writing that might extend language into communicating the illegible, the unspeakable, and the unthinkable. We will entertain both the critical necessities and flights of fancy that might move us to write (with) a new kind of language, while paying respect to the languages of heritage and artistic practice we bring into the workshop. This new writing and new language may come from moving the hand, listening with the whole body, and marking or transcribing sound, breath, and space. Together, we might read and discuss the following: textual and visual scores by Raven Chacon, Candace Hopkins and Dylan Robinson, and Mónica de la Torre; artists books by Renee Gladman and Kameelah Janan Rasheed; video, sound and digital writing by Benjamin Krusling, 최 Lindsay (Lindsay Choi), and JJJJJerome Ellis; writing, soundings, and drawing by N.H.Pritchard and giovanni singleton; translation writing by Sawako Nakayasu and Mirene Arsanios; concrete poetry and asemic writing by Amanda Berenguer and Mirtha Dermisache; dictionaries and indexes by Harryette Mullen and Angelo V. Suarez; and video-performance and writing by Etel Adnan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuña, and Adrian Piper.
2022: The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Writing Faculty
2022: The Flow Chart Foundation, Workshop facilitator, On Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s “Texas”: Close Readings in a Virtual Space (video)
2022: The Poetry Project, Workshop facilitator, ”Just speak nearby”: Dis/Course with Kimberly Alidio.
Trinh T. Minh-ha says in her first film Reassemblage: “I do not intend to speak about; just speak nearby.” To “speak nearby” is to participate in co-listening, as well as speaking, in a moment shared with another across separate, albeit proximal, locations. This Dis/Course is an occasion to gather and make assemblages — screwed, welded, nailed pieces of sonic, voiced, textual materials of spatialized utterance — which one might call poems. Poetry recreates spatial ecologies of embodied speech and listening, and, I propose, has some similarities with sound art, which, according to Alan Licht, is an immersive experience through architectural space (as opposed to requiring one remains in place for the predetermined time of a musical performance or recording). How do poetic utterances move with found sounds of disturbed landscapes and diasporas: the affective tones, pitches, prosody, ambience, and noise by which a space speaks? And how do poems listen to others’ speaking? In the spirit of poetic assemblage, we will read sonic-focused writing (Hocine Tandjaoui, Brandon LaBelle, Maryanne Amacher, Anthony Reed, and Dylan Robinson), listen to sound poets and experimental vocalists (Pamela Z, Lily Greenham, Charles Amarkhanian, NH Pritchard, Charmaine Lee, Claire Rousay, Fel Santos, Tracie Morris, and giovanni singleton), and, perhaps, write with found (recorded) sounds as one would speak nearby.
From the workshop, published work by Gemma Boyd, Jen Hunter Connelly, Rachel Galperin, Gia Gonzales, Mack Gregg & Kassandra Savage, Yvonne LeBien, Marc Solomon, and Aaron Tian.
2021: 3 Hole Press, Workshop facilitator, Writing As Though You Might Write Again
A writing prompt is a kind of recipe. And the proliferation of recipes, writes Danny Licht, makes cooking a matter of technically worded instructions, timers, measurements when it should be instead a practice of connecting with one’s senses and what is at hand. This hybrid writing workshop is about our tastes, and the steps we take in our lives and writing to suit them. This workshop is about writing as though we might write again, akin to “cooking continuously, of allowing one thing to lead to another, of open-endedness and casual possibility” (Licht 13).
2021: Summer Writing Program, Jack Kerouac School, Naropa University, Workshop facilitator, Perception Is Material (co-taught w/ Stacy Szymaszek)
The act of perceiving the world and the archival/ official document is as much the material of the poem as the world and the document are. We will consider how poetry — in its prosodic and energetic charge, rather than in its reference to a world beyond perception — documents our material worlds. We will discuss how poets document what we might call oppositional realities, and how poets engage the texts and textures of archival/ official documents. (You are welcome to bring in your own archive or begin to create one for this workshop.) Through reading, discussion, and generative writing, we will together move towards radical possibilities in documentary poetry practice. Class texts include: Nathaniel Mackey, Sonny and Linda Sharrock, Alice Notley, Stephen Jonas, Hannah Weiner, M. NourbeSe Philip, Emily Abendroth, Aeon Ginsberg, Harmony Holiday, Benjamin Krusling. (Everything Data Flows: Documentary Poetics & Entanglement, Week 1)
2021: Kundiman, Workshop facilitator, Documentary Poetics: Archive + Counter-Lyric
Poets can care about and for language used to pose questions. We can make multi-dimensional macro-micro inquiries into the language used to pose answers. As much as we are typically tasked with imagining, we can attend to what is present and to what is already arriving. This eight-weeklong workshop splices together the poetic techniques of recording everyday life and engaging political-historical documents used to ask how poets subvert a self subject to the state, neoliberal capitalism, and the cultural diversity machine. We will write poems of our working and domestic day to ask, What is possible in the act of documentation? We will engage both the vitality and violence of archival documents, and turn our gaze back onto the documenter’s authority. We will write from the crossroads where past, present, and future are already in conversation. We will read, among others, Eduardo Corral, Joshua Escobar, Jasmine Gibson, Edgar Garcia, Renee Gladman, Saidiya Hartman, Julia Huxtable, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Benjamin Krusling, Pamela Lu, Myung Mi Kim, M. NourbeSe Philip, Akilah Oliver, Sara Uribe, and Jackie Wang.
