Dan Machlin will be teaching a ten-week long Saturday afternoon workshop, beginning February 13, 2010. The class will meet in the Neighborhood Preservation Center from 12-2 pm.

When poets or artists create work as part of some greater artistic or social project, this context dramatically impacts the way that we read or perceive their work. In this workshop, we’ll look beyond individual poems and examine writing that exhibits a strong project-based sensibility. We’ll read and try experiments based on diverse writing projects such as Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, Brenda Coultas’ The Bowery Project, Jill Magi’s Threads and Dodie Bellamy’s Vampire-inspired epistolary novel: The Letters of Mina Harker. We’ll also look at examples of projects from other genres —Chris Marker’s film La Jetée, the work of artists Sophie Calle and Robert Smithson, and playful endeavors from the world of music like Sufjan Stevens’ Fifty States Project. By inhabiting other artist’s projects, we will strengthen our own. We will compose or refine existing project statements for our own work, begin to write poems to populate those projects, and map out new directions and possibilities for our projects both on the page and beyond Guests for this workshop will include Brenda Coultas, Jill Magi plus other surprise guests.

Dan Machlin is a native NYC poet, performer and publisher. His books include Dear Body (Ugly Duckling Presse), 6×7 (Ugly Duckling) and This Side Facing You (Heart Hammer). Dan is the founder and senior editor of Futurepoem books.

Anselm Berrigan will be teaching a ten-week long Friday evening workshop, beginning February 12, 2010. The class will meet in the Parish Hall from 7-9 pm.

This workshop will focus heavily on the reading and discussion of longer poems and the visible and invisible strategies for creating and sustaining shape and momentum evident within their reading. “Longer” may run anywhere from ten to fifty pages, as things move, but there can be exceptions on the shorter side depending on a work’s density. The aim on the writing side will be to initiate a process through which one may develop a longer work, while asking a hopefully expansive set of questions about what there may be to know through the experience of reading and writing longer poems. We will read a selection of longer things by, among others, Douglas Oliver, Harryette Mullen, Allen Ginsberg, Kevin Davies, Philip Whalen, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Stephen Rodefer, Claudia Rankine, Alice Notley, Will Alexander, Ann Lauterbach, Robert Fitterman, and Marcella Durand. The starting point in most cases will be to read the work aloud in the church and go from there. Bring your throats and stamina.

Anselm Berrigan is author of four books of poetry, the most recent being Free Cell, published recently by City Lights. Works of his which fall into the longer range include “Have A Good One”, “To Hell With Sleep”, “Zero Star Hotel”, and possibly “Trained Meat”.

Sharon Mesmer will be teaching a ten-week long Tuesday evening workshop, beginning February 9, 2010. The class will meet in the Parish Hall from 7-9 pm.

You’ve heard it before: why is it that poets can write prose, but prose writers can’t write poetry? Maybe it’s because prose writers haven’t fully explored the places where poetry and prose effectively come together — the textural artus points that hinge and pivot to access the strengths of both forms.  In this workshop (open, of course, to poets who want to bring narrative intentionality to their work without sacrificing imagery), we will look at prose that blends narrative with idiosyncratic language (Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star; Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept), prose that includes poetry (Ki no Tsurayuki’s The Tosa Diary), prose vignettes (16th and 17th century Chinese “hsiao-p’in”; Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet), prose-poem essays (Nelson Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make) dream stories (Kafka’s The Bucket Rider), flarf fiction and cut-ups.  The above texts and many others will serve as examples for beginning, extending and finishing hybrid poem-stories.

Sharon Mesmer has published several books of poetry and short fiction and teaches both forms at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the New School.  She is a two-time NYFA fellow in poetry, and a member of the flarf collective.

Friday

Students from the Fall writing workshops, led by Vito Acconci and Mitch Highfill, will share their work.

Paolo Javier will be teaching a ten-week long Saturday afternoon workshop, beginning October 10, 2009. The class will meet in the Parish Hall from 12-2 pm.

Since the advent of the modern cartoon strip, poets, artists, and poet-artists alike have turned to its language as a vital source for innovation in their own practice. We will explore such a tradition. The presence of the poetic in the modern comic book will be a focus of our writing and discussion, and we will experiment with its potential through a diverse practice. Collaboration between participants will be required for selected exercises, and encouraged throughout the workshop. 

Paolo Javier is the author of LMFAO (OMG!), Goldfish Kisses (Sona Books), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada Books). He is currently working on OBB, a multimedia poetry comic, with artist Ernest Concepcion, and publishes 2nd Ave Poetry.

Mitch Highfill will be teaching a ten-week long Friday evening workshop, beginning October 9, 2009. The class will meet in the Parish Hall from 7-9pm.

This workshop takes the work of Jack Spicer and “the practice of the outside” as a starting point. We will explore different technologies long associated with magic (technologies such as spells, sigils and divination) to generate writing, both in and out of the workshop setting. We will work with sources as diverse as Gerard de Nerval, Christopher Dewdney and W.S. Burroughs. A magical approach to poetics will include such concepts as the Muse, the Duende and the lore accompanying these ideas. The goal here is to gain access to writing that is not limited by the habits of personality or the predilections of the poet, but can expand our ranges to include what Robin Blaser called the outside. We might also consider the more mundane but equally interesting usage of the word magic, that is to say, sleight of hand, or prestidigitation. What does a stage magician have in common with the writer? There will be lots of reading and writing in this workshop.

Mitch Highfill is a poet and Tarot consultant who lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of several books, including Moth Light (Abraham Lincoln) and REBIS (Open Mouth).

Vito Acconci will be teaching a ten-week long Tuesday evening workshop, beginning October 6, 2009. The class will meet in the Parish Hall from 7-9pm.

Poetry from another direction: poetry ‘caused by’ architecture & design…

Architectural materials & words as matter (‘concrete’ words, not abstractions – William Carlos Williams’ ‘No idea but in things’); the structure – the engineering – of a building & sentence-structure (diagramming a sentence & plans/section in architecture); scripts (narrative scripts, film scripts) & computer-scripting in architecture); punctuation – like Emily Dickinson’s dashes — & the time taken to walk through a building, through a city, through landscape); Roget’s Thesaurus as a geography, a terrain, of words (the dictionary is from the mechanical age, while Roget’s Thesaurus presages the internet)…

We might read Michel Butor’s Mobile (traveling through the United States in words, cities & rivers & mountains scrawled across the page); but we’ll also see the beginning of Alain Robbe-Grillet/Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad (the camera traversing corridor after corridor as the narrator’s voice performs a travelogue & a hypnotism); & we’ll listen to Vladislav Delay & Alva Noto (music & architecture are the same: each makes a surrounding, a context, an ambience – you can do other things while listening to music, you do other things while in the middle of architecture, both architecture & music engender multi-attention, the keynote of the 21^st century)…

From a background of poetry & then art, Vito Acconci became a designer/architect & formed Acconci Studio in 1988.  They’ve recently built a person-made island that twists from bowl to dome in Graz & a clothing store as soft as clothing in Tokyo; they’re working on a strip-mall makeover in the U.S. & a floating park over a railroad in Vienna.  He still begins projects with words.