"I Pass my life / through the eye of the same rusty / old needle / and I sew, I sew my passion.” — Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Trans. Eleni Fourtouni
Poetry, like life, never happens in a vacuum. We are always tied to our own times and bodies and political circumstances, but this is not a restrictive bind–it is a powerful thread connecting us all. If we re-consider the act of “documentation” as less about trying to preserve time and more about trying to understand our relationship to it and role within it, then we can start to view poems not as static works of art on a page, but as an enduring record of lived experience. This is poetry that digs its heels into time and says: “I was here, I am still here, and I will go on being here.”
During this six-week, in-person workshop, we will read and engage with a number of poets and musicians who have used their work to document their experience in relation to the political circumstances of their time. Together we will work towards a poetry of interconnectedness—one that can mobilize us in the present moment while also reaching forward to the future, leaving a record of our movements in its wake.
Polaroid image, Anniversary (2018), mine
Works engaged with may include (but are not limited to):
Gillian Welch, Time (the Revelator)
Greek Women Poets, translated by Eleni Fourtouni.
Solmaz Sharif, Look.
Fady Joudah, […]
Javier Zamora, Unaccompanied.
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, I Don’t Want To Be Understood.
Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.
Judy Grahn, A Woman Is Talking To Death
Tory Dent, Black Milk.
Diamanda Galás, Plague Mass, Defixiones [Will & Testament].
David Wojnarowicz, The Waterfront Journals.