2025 1 May 7:00-8:15pm: The Time of a Sentence: Flash Poetic Essays: Virtual Workshop | The Poetry Society of New York
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: American Empires: Culture and Counternarratives | Bard Masters of Art in Teaching
Which languages, terms, definitions, and usages have persisted through colonization, so to speak, to tell the tale? What are the ecological, technological, social, political, and historical contexts complicating authorship, agency, and learning? 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? 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. We will highlight a range of conventional and innovative ways to engage the poetic energies of historical documents and academic writing. Our objective is to study how people study and reflect on their lived realities to flourish autonomously against, in the midst of, and in the afterlives of empire.
2024: Theory and Practice of Pedagogy | Bard Prison Initiative
Proposal #1: Freire definesliberatory pedagogyas 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 anew 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: Grammar(year-long course in language studies) | Bard Prison Initiative
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: Language and Thinking | Bard College Institute for Thinking and Writing
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 will read textual and visual scores; artists books; video, sound and digital writing; translingual literature; concrete poetry and asemic writing; dictionaries and indexes; and video-performance writing.
2022: The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College
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, listen to sound poets and experimental vocalists, 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.
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: Perception Is Material (co-taught w/ Stacy Szymaszek) | Summer Writing Program, Jack Kerouac School, Naropa University
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.
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.
Artist talk on Repeater by Julie Tolentino (Curator and host), 18 August 2021
2021: Introduction to Poetry | University of Arizona, Creative Writing
2021-2022: United States History, 1600s-2000s | Bard Early College Hudson Valley
2018-2020: Compositionand Rhetoric | University of Arizona, English Department
2012-2018: United States History, 1600-1865; U.S. History and the World in the 20th Century;Seminar in Cosmopolitanism | St. Stephen’s Episcopal School (Austin, TX)
2011-2012: Diverse American Perspectives; Global Perspectives | St. Edward’s University, University Programs
2010: Asian American History | University of Illinois, Asian American Studies, Visiting Professor and Post-doctoral Fellow
2001-2009: University of Texas, Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies
1999: Filipino American History | University of Michigan, Program in American Cultures
1998: History of Chicago | Columbia College Chicago
2023: Conversation with the Contemporary Poetics Working Group, hosted by Tessa Bolsover + Michael Cavuto | John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
2023: Sonic Languages 4: The Mutable Poem, An Artist Talk on Teeter, hosted by Noah Ross + Small Press Traffic | Et al. books, San Francisco, CA.
2021: Artist talks & reading on : once teeth bones coral : and Famous Hermits, w/ Stacy Szymaszek, hosted by Prageeta Sharma | Literary Series: Poetry and Prose | Pomona College, Claremont, CA
2021: Artist talk on : once teeth bones coral : , hosted by Gabrielle Civil | Writing Now Reading Series | California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita, CA
2017: Artist talk on after projects the resound w/ Jason Magabo Perez, hosted by Josen Diaz and May Fu | University of San Diego, San Diego, CA
2017: Artist talk on after projects the resound, hosted by James McMaster | PERFUT 306 - Race and Performance | New York University, New York, NY
2017: Artist talk on after projects the resound, hosted by Ruth Nicole Brown | GWS 201: Race, Gender and Power | University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Urbana, IL
2016: Artist talk on solitude being alien, hosted by Fred Moten | University of California-Riverside, Riverside, CA
