Fridays 7-9PM – 10 Sessions – Begins February 1

There’s something in front of our eyes every waking minute. And other senses are at work as well 24/7. All the tiny little threads and patterns, all the atoms and dust particles in the air, all the mirror images, the lights on the highway–this will be a workshop in the translation of the ephemeral–the moment to moment experiences that are barely perceptible–into some other kind of language. Mostly, it will be an attempt to find a form for all types of experience, including the dialogue interieur which never stops. We’ll look at the Objectivists–Reznikoff,  Oppen, Zukofsky,  Niedecker especially–as a first stop, and move on to works by Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, Renee Gladman, Robert Creeley, Wang Ping and Horacio Castellaos Moya (a master of the run-on sentence), among others. But mostly we will dwell on the nature of the aphoristic, all the action that takes place on the periphery, the way the center of attention fades into the background, swerving towards the light (and away from it, at the same time), and how everything adds up to something in the end.

Lewis Warsh is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction and autobiography. He is editor and publisher of United Artists Books and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Long Island University, Brooklyn. The fall 2012 issue of Mimeo Mimeo (#7) featured his poetry, fiction and collages.