Spring 2010 Program & Course Offering

Just finalized the course description, which is now up on Evergreen's website, of my (our) spring 2010 Evergreen course.  This should be fun.  And I'm hoping to team up with visiting artist Jeff Glassman to co-teach this program, tho nothing finalized on that yet.  Meantime, if interested, drop me a line or go online & register.

Poets Theater, Guerilla Poetry, & The Politics of Language

Note: This 8-credit program will meet from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays and from 4 to 8 p.m. on Saturdays.

What does it mean to perform the text? What happens when genres collide? This creative writing program will bring together several terms often thought to be well-defined—including “poetry,” “prose,” “theater,” “politics,” and “essay” —and, through experiments in writing, reading, and collaborating, re-narrate their meanings and implications. Along the way we’ll investigate key concepts and texts in poets theater and guerilla poetry, mining them to create our own individual and collaborative writings. Our work will culminate in “poets theater week,” a week at the end of the quarter dedicated to showcasing our work as part of the final series of PRESS literary events of 2009-10. Working in groups, we’ll spread out into the larger Olympia community and “perform” or “stage” our pieces. (To learn more about PRESS, visit David's public blog: davidwolach.blogspot.com )

During the quarter, our meetings will consist of weekly seminars, lectures, and “language labs”—times for brainstorming, rehearsing, and trying out language experiments. Guest artists will also come to campus to work with us. By the end of the quarter students will have a new portfolio of writings and, where appropriate, will have developed existing portfolios through collaborative refashioning and critique. Readings will include selections from The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Ranciere’s The Politics of Aesthetics, and individual pieces by Bertoldt Brecht, Hannah Weiner, Tina Darragh, Chris Mann, Thalia Field, BARGE, Nonsense Company, Tonya Foster, Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff, Laura Elrick, and Rodrigo Toscano. Though helpful, students are not expected to have a background in either creative writing or theater to do well in this program.

Book Received: Remember to Wave by Kaia Sand (Tinfish Press)

In the rush to finish a ton of things, including a spring course on public space, dissent and guerilla poetry, a reprieve: the beautiful Remember to Wave by Kaia Sand just came in the mail today. My very own copy.  I only had a  chance to glance at the work so far, thumbing thru the thing & stopping here & there, but it's hard hitting, transporting, & gorgeously designed - and beauty here takes on many forms, not least the "zine" feel to a lot of the adverts, and other found signage that Sand uses here to help re-map the not-so-beautiful understructures of Portland.  Wow, this is a cool book.  And just in time for me to include at least part of it in my syllabus for spring, and just in time for Kaia's and Jules Boykoff's PRESS Event talk/reading at Evergreen (post below) on Thursday @ 730.  More on this book soon.  For now, back to working on lecture for Wednesday: aptly, Ranciere, redistributon of the sensible, Nonsite Collective, & other autonomous / radical pedagogical models.   

PRESS 2009-2010: Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand

Join poet/activists Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand for a tour of their latest work

                 

The Evergreen State College

Where: Sem II Building, Room C1105

    When: January 28, 7:30pm 

Boykoff and Sand helped organize the recent Econvergence conference in Portland (http://www.econvergence.org/). They are the founders of the Tangent Press and reading series in Portland (http://www.thetangentpress.org/readings.html) and co-authored a new book on guerrilla poetry entitled Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press 2008). 

 

Boykoff is the author, most recently, of Hegemonic Love Potion (Factory School, 2009) and Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge (Edge Books, 2006). He has also published and lectured widely on the suppression of dissent in the United States. He is a contributor to scholarly journals like Antipode, Social Movement Studies, and New Political Science as well as popular publications like the Guardian, Common Dreams, and XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics. He was an  invited speaker at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi, Kenya (2006), where he presented research he carried out on U.S. media coverage of global warming.  

Sand is the author most recently of Remember to Wave, forthcoming this winter with Tinfish Press. This collection investigates political geography in Portland, Oregon, and contains a poetry walk she guides. Her  collection, interval (Edge Books 2004), was selected as a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year and she is also the author/designer of several chapbooks through the Dusie Kollektiv. She is a contributor to Jim Dine’s Hot Dreams series (Steidl Editions 2008) and recently performed poetry collaged entirely from the North American Free Trade Agreement at the Positions Colloquium of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, British Columbia. At present, she is at work on The Happy Valley Project, multi-media collaborations investigating housing foreclosures and finance.