Radical Forms
Painting for the Wind
Take a canvas bag and fill it with seeds of any kind.
Cut a hole in the bag.
Place the bag where there is wind.
�Yoko Ono
n Each week we will study a different experimental approach to changing our formal, spatial, linguistic, and performative paradigms that we have either assigned or accepted the assignment of to our own creative work. Then, in the spirit of experiment, we will spend some time in class on writing exercises. A section of each class will be also used for sharing work created in the intervening week and receiving feedback from one another.
n Reading homework: I�ll provide readings suggestions at the end of each. We�ll use this work as the basis of our study, and then try similar approaches in writing exercises designed for the class.
n Writing assignments: Each week I will give a different �formal� writing assignment that may or may not appeal to your senses or sensibilities. In the spirit of experimentation and the class community I am going to request that you do your best to work with the formal constraints of each assignment. I never assign content-based exercises.
n Meditation and performance exercises: Each class will incorporate a brief period of meditation or movement practice. Some of the classes may include light breathing exercises, vocal practice, or physical movements. The third class (�Re-thinking Performed Space�) will incorporate movement within the physical workshop space. I encourage you to participate in these exercises to your own physical comfort level.
n You will need in each class: your own journal, a notebook of more disposable nature (one you can tear pages out of, etc.), writing implement. For class six (�Polylingual and Polyphonic Occurrence�) you may want a bilingual dictionary or phrase-book or grammar, or the like.
Week One: �Re/connect: Chronological, Logical, Authorial, Subjective, and Objective Disjunction�
We�ll spend the first week thinking about the political, social, and economic assumptions of linearity, traditional narratives, first person writing, and closure. Through an examination of various writers who�ve rejected or transformed these notions we will try, through a writing exercise, to approach the �subject� or �object� of our writing from different, non-colonizing perspectives.
Week Two: �Vision/Re/Vision: Incorporating Original Sound�
In our second week, we will level a mean critique against the �final version� of writing, and question exactly what it is that we are revising away when we revise�why the modern understanding of �seeing again� as effacing the original structure? The �revision� of Manhattan is false�deep under the water tables and skyscrapers the ancient structures still breathe. Can we return as writers to a.more ancient understanding of �seeing again��one in which the original and later versions co-exist meaningfully?
Week Three: �Rethinking Performed Space�
How can wild conceptions of our work as performed moments affect its own life as a living, sacred entity somewhat beyond our own mortal touch? Can it be whispered, danced, sung, grunted, growled, declaimed, scrawled on building sides, otherwise be tossed into the living world? What�s the third unsettling space�the one that exists between writer and reader? The third space, the secret that no one knows is the work itself. We�re going to use voice, movement, and drawing exercises in this class to reconceive �performance� of our work, and write �performance scores� for imagined �events.�
Week Four: �Unbind and Wander�
In the ancient understanding, �wandering� was holy practice. The monks wandered, the ascetic yogis wandered, as did Lalla the mystic of Kashmir, Moses and Jesus each wandered in the desert on sacred vision quests. We�ll take the page as our desert and unenslave our words from lines, our lines from the Left Margin of the Printer-Publisher�s empire. We will have by now become syntactically impervious to the demands of the consumer culture�s need for �apprehensibility� (different from �accessibility!�) of our work and will conduct radical experimentation in spatial and visual possibilities of our work. Some basic supplies will be provided, i.e. poster papers, crayons, colored pencils, and markers, but you may choose to bring others, such as ink, pens, water-color paints, glue-stick, scissors, pencil, calligraphy brush, fine paper, etc.
Week Five: �Radical Forms�
Contemporary Asian and Asian-American writers have used some radical approaches�and in some cases a return to traditionally Asian approaches�to �form� in their work to write their way out of received Eurocentric linguistic spaces, accepted formal approaches to �poem,� and �the novel,� and create new possibilities for their future work. We�re going to spend some time looking at writings by a few of these writers including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Bhanu Kapil Rider, Myung Mi Kim, Maya Lin, and Kimiko Hahn. Then, using a unique writing exercise, we�re going to try to incorporate the previous four weeks of study into a meditative practice, inventing our own �form.�
Week Six: �Polylingual and Polyphonic Occurrences�
In our final week, we are going travel back across the oceans to our original languages. What traces of it have lingered in our mouths�even when speaking�or writing�in English that we have not yet heard? Through a study of vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and rhetorical strategies of our native language, we will respectfully experiment with our own levels of hybridity and fluidity, moving towards recognizing, encouraging, and respecting our own personal linguistic system, with its own masala of semiotic possibility for our linguistic, visual, and performed expression.
Recommended Books
Agha Shahid Ali, Country Without a Post Office, W.W. Norton
Louis Armand, Seances, Twisted Spoon Press
Olga Broumas and T Begley, Sappho�s Gymnasium, Copper Canyon
Therea Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, Univesity of California Press
Bei Dao, Unlock, New Directions Publishing
Kimiko Hahn, Mosquito and Ant, W.W. Norton
Brenda Hillman, Loose Sugar, Wesleyan University Press
Susan Howe, The Non-conformist�s Memorial, New Directions Publishing
Myung Mi Kim, Commons, University of California Press
Richard Kostelanetz, Wordworks: New and Selected Poems, BOA Editions
Maya Lin, Boundaries, Simon and Schuster
Harryette Mullen, Sleeping With the Dictionary, University of California Press
Yoko Ono, Grapefruit, Simon and Schuster
Joan Retallack, How to Do Things with Words, Sun and Moon Press
Bhanu Kapil Rider, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Kelsey Street Press
**For additional syllabi/sample workshop descriptions, or to inquire about booking, contact [email protected].
