This page is for participants in the Life as Rehearsal for the Poem workshop, Year 3, October 2022. (How this got its name, here.) Each week’s course materials will be posted on this page requiring you to scroll down each week.
(Make sure to try to click on any image. They usually have links. Course open only to those who have gone through at least a year of workshops.)
Dear LARFP People! The first five week workshop to happen via Zoom Sunday nights 4-6pm PDT begins October 2 and goes the next four weeks, Oct 9, 16, 23 & 30. We will focus on Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets, on your Day Song results if you do that & on the progress of your serial project/saturation job.
OCTOBER LARFP REGISTRATION IS OPEN NOW!
ORDER AND READ:
From Godine Publishers, re: Heart First Into This Ruin:
Dear Mr. Nelson,
Our publisher has agreed to offer a 10% discount with free shipping to your students. They will need to call our office to place the order and mention your name to receive this discount…
Best Regards,
Linda Johnson
Godine
1-800-344-4771
M-F 9A-4:30P EASTERN TIME
OCTOBER 2, 2022
READ:
https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Feminine-Excerpt-from-AA-A-Little-History.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/monet-rouen-cathedral-paintings/ Can you imagine an obsession you have that could be applied to a multi-decade research/writing project? What gives Monet’s series its power? The question: “What does the replication do to the meaning of the image?” Is it something that can be applied to poetry? Via grafting?
https://caesuramag.org/posts/on-literary-evolution-interview-stephane-mallarme-cid-corman
READ/WATCH:
https://khak.com/hidden-message-on-iowa-tombstone-causing-controversy-video/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/28/sleep-tracker-wearable-brain/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/20/yoko-onos-art-of-defiance
WRITE:
https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Tomorrows-Prompt.pdf
We’ll get into Wanda’s sonnets after week 1 so I can determine if folks have the book. I will makes scans if necessary.
OCTOBER 9, 2022
READ:
Wanda Coleman American Sonnets 1-24
(Some background on the project here.)
Adrienne Rich — Compulsory Heterosexuality
LISTEN:
https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/2022/09/fumiko-kimura-sumi/ (At least listen to the segment on Haiga.)
ALSO THIS RECORDING OF WANDA:
WRITE:
Your choice, ten American Sonnets or a Haiga. Remember Wanda’s instructions on American Sonnets: “1) issues (what the sonnet is about) 2) rhythms (places and devices often have them) 3) tones (shadings of attitude) 4) musical taste/preference (rock, classical, blues, etc.)–how to develop the minimal language to simultaneously encapsulate and signal each.” Could you approximate the tone of Wanda in your poems? If you start veering into First World Problems, they’re not going to work. How to blend the rhetoric of kvetching with innovative rhythms, surprising adjectives (“the moon is livid white”) and earn the abstractions, something even Wanda does not do 100% of the time. Her equations and other lineation tropes are fair game. Maybe you could offer some dedications as well or riff off of different poems of say Akhmatova, as Wanda did in #23.
HAIGAMANIA:
https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/HaigaMania.pdf
OCTOBER 16, 2022
READ:
Wanda Coleman American Sonnets 25-40
http://amazingastronomy.thespaceacademy.org/2022/08/astrobiologists-say-planet-earth-itself.html If you are continuing to write American Sonnets (or Canadian Sonnets which are currently 78% of an American Sonnet) or Mexican Sonnets, could you write one as Wanda Coleman as planet earth? Consider.
https://hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/2022-issue45-1/Welch-Kaufman-Frogpond%2045-1.pdf
What do you think about this essay? Is the narrator credible? Is Kaufman interesting to you? Would you re-type a dead person’s poems to remove capitol letters?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/06/27/artist-sam-gilliam-dies/
Does “taking art off the walls” work? What do you like about Sam Gilliam’s fabric paintings?
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/between-the-lines-a-conversation-with-diane-di-prima/
What about di Prima can you take from this interview? What question should have been asked?
Kusamakura (from Kosho) Does a world made by ordinary people a) Make sense? b) Comfort you? c) Scare you? d) None of the above. Why?
WRITE:
Allen’s Oily Asphalt Empire State Postcard Exercise
OCTOBER 23, 2022
READ:
Wanda Coleman American Sonnets 41-56
Robert Kelly: Prefix: Finding the measure
Article about Digital Folklore
LISTEN (to both the poem and the interview):
https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/2022/10/pierre-joris-on-a-nomad-poetics/
WRITE: https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/A-Nomad-Poem-After-Pierre-Joris-.pdf
REGISTER:
Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century—A Conversation with Rowena Kennedy-Epstein & Francesca Wade Thu, Oct 27, 5:00 PM (EDT, 2PM PDT). This event will take place in-person in The Skylight Room (9100) at the CUNY Graduate Center. Click here to Register and attend.
Join The Center for the Humanities for a conversation with Rowena Kennedy-Epstein on her new book Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth-Century which explores Rukeyser’s analysis of the gender politics of women’s artistic lives and labor based on Rukeyser’s extraordinary archive of unpublished and incomplete works. In this conversation, biographer Francesca Wade and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein will explore the ways in which the archive remains an invaluable space for writing women’s lives – thinking about how political repression and misogyny influences the kinds of texts we have access to, read and value, and showing why bringing unpublished archival materials into publication has changed how we understand the culture and politics of the 20th-Century.
WATCH OCTOBER 29, 10AM PDT, 1PM EDT GET VIMEO LINK HERE.
OCTOBER 30, 2022
READ: Wanda Coleman American Sonnets 57-100
READ: Rent going up? One company’s algorithm could be why
READ: Brainwashed (Sex Camera Power)
WATCH: Brainwashed Trailer
READ/Listen: Wanda Coleman Emmett Till