“i came here, child, because i care / for your welfare as my own” — chorus speaking to elektra (trans. anne carson)
We often think of a chorus as the part of a song we can’t get out of our head. It’s no coincidence that the ancient Greek root of the word implies a collective singing and dancing of poetry. In ancient Greek drama, the chorus was a persona both one and many—a group of voices speaking and moving together that would periodically interact with the characters on stage as part of the plot while also providing contextual information for the audience directly. The chorus was both inside and outside the action at once. “The ideal spectator,” as scholars have noted, representative of a larger collective experience, in contrast to the individual “hero.”
In this five-week online workshop, we’ll consider ourselves—our many selves, those different versions of us across every time and place that we have lived—to create our own personal poetic landscape. By creating poems out of our composite lived experience, we’ll begin to feel time as less linear and more spherical, allowing many different versions of ourselves to speak at once—in essence creating a chorus of selves, a unique landscape in which we’re both the actors and spectators of our own lives, both the speakers and audiences of our own poems. We’ll explore different interpretations of the chorus (by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles) and the work of contemporary poets who expertly use multiple voices to create unique, tactile landscapes from their lived experiences.
Works engaged with included:
Sophokles, Elektra (trans. Anne Carson)
Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Exilée / Temps Morts
David Wojnarowicz, Waterfront Journals
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, im alive. it hurts. i love it.
Tiana Clark, I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood
Nina Simone, various work
Diamanda Galás, You Must Be Certain Of The Devil