Advanced Workshops

Is there a place for poetry in a society in which reading has been declared dead-where at the very least, reading threatens to be eclipsed by scanning? In this workshop/laboratory, we will explore material whose response is a delirious yes-poetry that revels in charging the confines of the page and book. Exposure to an archive of modernist and contemporary visual and sound poetry, artists' books, contemporary installation and performance works, and relevant theories of media dislodgment will help us compose our own answers to the (old) question: what forms are poems obliged or inspired to take as language goes viral, in the face of total information, digitization, and post-literary culture? Readings and viewings in 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, visits to local writing-arts collections, and class visits by local artists will help us generate our own works. Students will complete weekly assignments across media, and engage with the writing of their peers formally, while working toward a culminating piece in a medium of their choice: this final piece can take the form of a chapbook, performance, installation, or other pertinent channel. Works studied may include the envelope poems of Emily Dickinson, a range of mid-century concrete poems, DICTEE (by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicu-a, the "total translations" of Jerome Rothenberg, Drift (by Caroline Bergvall), the art of Etel Adnan and Barbara Kruger, performances, texts, and graphic work by Edwin Torres, The Jew's Daughter (by Judd Morrissey), the instagram feeds of Shelley Jackson, and more.

"It is difficult / to get the news from poems," Williams wrote in 1955, yet American poetry has demonstrated since its inception a fascination with public events and how poetry itself might respond to, even intervene in, those events. This course will explore the genre of the "public" poem, a poem shaped by-registering, responding to, remonstrating against-public phenomena, and one which locates the poetic "self" within a wider social newsscape. On the premise that creative work is socially produced, and that the best training for a writer, therefore, is to read extensively, we will examine an eclectic range of contemporary "public" poetry-Peter Balakian, Quan Barry, Joshua Clover, Martha Collins, Tyehimba Jess, Jill McDonaugh, Gregory Pardlo, Anne Winters-and engage pressing questions in historical and contemporary poetics. We will also, of course, produce, share, and workshop a significant body of our own "public" poetry. What, we will ask, makes a poem of its moment but not momentary? How is "public" poetry different from "political" poetry? Incorporating basic and advanced issues in poetic craft-open form, braided narratives, the ethics of witness-as well as attendance at poetry readings and some critical writing, the course will ultimately help us find and sharpen those techniques necessary to write our keenest, most urgent poetry. We will write, then, not only about public history, but into it.

In this advanced writing workshop students will write two short stories and revise one. The workshop will focus on traditional aspects of craft while the short writing and reading assignments will focus on various writing processes. We will learn through practice how different writing approaches utilize or ameliorate the vital power of the ego. "Ego" is self: ourselves and our own experiences are vital for writing fiction with authenticity. But ego can also get in the way of creation and foment fear and pretension. Reading modern short stories by Alice Walker, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami and Lan Samantha Chang among others, we will look at "ego" as a function of characterization and the self in fiction. We'll read essays by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung on "Active Imagination," theories of automatic writing by Beat poets, and ideas of writing pedagogy by Peter Elbow and will question how and why calibrating ego is essential for authors and characters, and when ego can detract from the power of the imaginary world and "first thoughts."

This course is for students with works-in-progress, whether a story collection or a novel, who feel stuck in their manuscripts. In weekly workshop sessions, we'll re-examine what's actually at stake in the narrative draft. We'll help each other dive deeper in our writing, to rediscover submerged aspects of the narrative that can be further explored - and what to do once we've uncovered them. With accompanying readings of novel excerpts and stories, we'll also examine how to incorporate next-level techniques such as re-sequencing the plot, imposing metaphorical value, and thematic layering of storylines.

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will work on novel-length projects, completing two polished chapters and an outline of a full novel. We will explore how to structure a book that is both propulsive and character-driven, and how to create a compelling, unique narrative voice. Work by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Ha Jin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Akhil Sharma will help us consider the crucial relationship between characters and their contexts.

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, economical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we'll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale. By pairing readings with generative exercises in stylistics and constrained writing, we will build toward the translation of a short work of contemporary fiction into English. To participate in this workshop, students should be able to comfortably read a literary text in a foreign language.

Focusing on the theory, history and practice of poetic translation, this seminar includes sessions with invited theorists and practitioners from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Taking translation to be an art of making sense that is transmitted together with a craft of shapes and sequences, we aim to account for social and intellectual pressures influencing translation projects. We deliberately foreground other frameworks beyond "foreign to English" and "olden epochs to modern"-and other methods than the "equivalence of meaning"-in order to aim at a truly general history and theory of translation that might both guide comparative cultural history and enlarge the imaginative resources of translators and readers of translation. In addition to reading and analysis of outside texts spanning such topics as semantic and grammatical interference, gain and loss, bilingualism, self-translation, pidgin, code-switching, translationese, and foreignization vs. nativization, students will be invited to try their hands at a range of tactics, aiming toward a final portfolio of annotated translations.

The stories we avoid are often as important as the ones we embrace. This idea can pose one of the most difficult hurdles for writers as they find and develop a distinctive voice and style. When we tell a story, whether through personal narrative, research, reportage, or criticism, we are implicitly asking for our reader's empathy and acknowledgment. But how does one do this when the subject at hand is taboo? In this reading and writing workshop, we will explore the challenges of writing about subjects often avoided or ignored in public discourse: menstruation, lactation, childbirth, maternal ambivalence, death and dying, sex, perversion, violence, and other uncomfortable subjects that force us to forego sentimentality and received knowledge. We'll discuss how other writers do this: reading works such as Emily Witt's Future Sex, Meghan Daum's Unspeakable, Rivka Galchen's Little Labors or Barry Lopez' Sliver of Sky. Students will choose a single topic to research and to write about throughout the quarter, both in short assignments and in a longer piece to be workshopped by the class.

What do poets do with surplus, with extras, leftovers, and other excesses of production? Is there a creative use to put them to? When viewed in the context of ecology and economy, what are the ethical dimensions of working with surplus? Or are there also ethics and aesthetics of the useless? With these guiding questions, this course will introduce students to methods for a creative approach to waste, and develop revision practices that draw on the reuse of material surplus. We will consider forms of excess (literary, artistic, economic, material, etc.) and their creative applications. We'll examine diverse types of waste and things that "waste", including literal trash, ruins, the body, time, the dream, and everyday texts (such as emails, text messages, rough drafts, conversations, and ephemeral media). Ultimately, this course will help students engage in the revision process. Reading may include A.R. Ammons' Garbage, Eliot's The Waste Land, Jen Bervin's Nets, Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day, Andr_ Breton's Mad Love, Joyelle McSweeney's Dead Youth, or The Leaks, George Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, and Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Students will write and turn in two full-length stories or novel chapters for this workshop-based class. While we won't ignore such fundamental elements of fiction writing as POV and narrative distance, characterization, setting, and dialogue, the class will pay special attention to how Narrative Questions (that is, questions that sustain the tension of a narrative) as well as the rate of character revelation can be used to both drive and pace a story or novel. In addition to submitting and reading for workshop, expect to read and discuss at least one novel and a selection of short stories.