Week Three Courses

This week, writers from Bosnia, Turkey, Mexico, China, and indigenous America join us as we consider ways to acknowledge the richness of linguistic, historical, and ritual difference, yet enjoy common ground. What are the stories of ethnicity that we arrive with and where do they go? How do we regard the power structures that dominate our lives? What do we read and in what tongues? How do we translate and study our various maps and boundaries?

Noncranedit Course #: WRI 053, tuition: $475 per week
BA Course #: WRI 453, tuition: TBA
MFA Course #: WRI 753, tuition: TBA

Sinan Antoon Strangers to Ourselves

How do writers position themselves in a foreign cultural landscape or, at times, a foreign language? How are homelands re-imagined and transcended? How do exilic writings negotiate and problematize nationalism and the very concept of home? Do we all, as subjects, inhabit different degrees of exile? Readings (which may include Darwish, Malouf, Cavafy, and Khatibi (and writing assignments) will grapple with these themes.

Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi born poet, novelist, and filmmaker. His poems and essays have appeared in various journals and publications in the Arab world, as well as The Nation, Bomb, Ploughshares and World Literature Today. His books include The Baghdad Blues and I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody.. His translation of Darwish’s, In the Presence of Absence, is forthcoming from Archipelago.
He teaches at New York University.

Photo Credit:
Valaurie Yazzie

Sherwin Bitsui Shifting Modalities

Diné dynamism: action and movement give force and meaning to form, structure, archetype,
and bring about conceptual naming in resulting Navajo language. A poem/song may affect the modalities of perception and bring transformation to place and being. We will examine various texts regarding this notion of dynamic activity in the Navajo universe and attempt to create a body of work that can operate as transformative/figurative agency.

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is Diné of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the recipient of the 2000−01 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, a 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship at IAIA, a Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency, and a 2006 Whiting Writer’s Award. Books include Shapeshift and Flood Song.

Xi Chuan TBA

Xi Chuan (official name Liu Jun), poet, essayist, translator, was born in the City of Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, in 1963. He studied English literature at the Peking University from 1981 to 1985, and later worked as an editor for the magazine Huangqiu for eight years. He was a visiting scholar to the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, in 2002, and a visiting adjunct professor to New York University in 2007, the Orion Scholar to the University of Victoria, Canada in 2009. He is currently teaching Classical Chinese Literature at the School of Liberal Arts, Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

Photo Credit:
Rob Ray

Dolores Dorantes & Jen Hofer Sad and Sweet (Trilce): Unmapping Structures of Power, Mapping Acts of Agency

Which power structures order (and border) our thinking and practice? Where can we enact agency to formulate alternate structures? How do we invent autonomous, activated modes of practice, in writing and beyond writing − how and where do we construct textual and extra-textual strategies, public practices, poetic interventions, gift economies, spaces for unexpected conversation and a radical ethic of listening? Our exploration uses as its lens César Vallejo’s Trilce, alongside other canon-exploding Latin American texts.

Dolores Dorantes’ books include sexoPUROsexoVELOZ, Lola (cartas cortas), and Poemas para Niños. Her op-ed pieces, criticism, and investigative texts have been published widely in Mexico. sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre, a bilingual edition of books two and three, translated by Jen Hofer, was co-published by Counterpath Press and Kenning

Editions. Dolores lives in Ciudad Juárez; she is founding director of the border arts collective Compañía Frugal and directs a non-profit women’s advocacy and education organization.

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, and urban cyclist. Her most recent books are a series of anti-war-manifesto poems titled one; sexoPUROsexoVELOZ; and Septiembre, a translation from Dolores Dorantes; The Route, a collaboration with Patrick Durgin; lip wolf, a translation of Laura Solórzano’s lobo de labio.

Jack Hirschman The Communist Manifesto: The Original Arcane

The incendiary poem, written in prose form, will be discussed in relation to itscontemporary relevance, and the conditions it describes will provide the ground for discussions of Jack Hirschman's The Arcanes, the monumental series of compositions that has been compared to The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson andThe Cantos of Ezra Pound. We will include discussions on composition by "field" and the orchestrated poem.

Jack Hirschman was born in New York City (The Bronx) in 1933. He is the Emeritus Poet Laureate of the City of San Francisco (2006-09), the author of more than 100 books of poetry, including translations of poets from nine languages. His masterwork, The Arcanes, was published in Italy in 2006. He is a member of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade, the co-editor of Left Curve magazine, and a writer for the People's Tribune.

Anselm Hollo Morphing Texts: Translation, Transformation

An introduction to the history, practice, and IDEA of translation. A look at existing translations of poems both familiar and unfamiliar, and attempts to create our own. No "foreign language" skills required (this one's quite foreign enough!).

Anselm Hollo, poet and literary translator, is a Professor in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. His most recent books are Notes on the Possibilities
and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965-2000 and Guests of Space (both from Coffee House Press).

Bob Holman Disappearing Tongues: Orality, Technology and the Poetry of Endangered Languages

This is an activist course for poetry itself! Of the 6500 languages on earth, half will be gone by the end of this century. Language is culture − what wisdom and knowledge disappears when a language vanishes? Poetry is the essence of language and varies greatly from culture to culture − can it be utilized to help save language itself? What is the difference in consciousness between orality and literacy? What if the performance IS the poem? What kind of new “book” are new technologies creating? Can this crisis be transmitted − and transformed − through your own writing/performing?

Bob Holman’s work has recently taken him to West Africa and Israel/Palestine to document the poetry of endangered languages. He also made a film on Ginsberg in India that was documented in Rattapallax and as a CD with music by Peter Gordon. He created The United States of Poetry for PBS, is founder/proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, and teaches at NYU and Columbia. Book: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a collaboration with Chuck Close. CD: The Awesome Whatever.

Semezdin Mehmedinovic Influence of Poetry on Film

This course will explore different aspects of translation. The main focus will concern the influence of poetry on film.

Semezdin Mehmedinovic is a Bosnian poet. His books Sarajevo Blues (1998) and Nine Alexandrias (2003) were translated by Ammiel Alcalay and published by City Lights. He lives in Alexandria, VA.

Murat Nemet-Nejat A Rhetoric of Rebellion

The course will focus first on the processes of translation, how translation may cut open and generate changes in the target language, making it “grow a new limb.” The course will also explore the idea of a “contra image” – how, by adopting the visual language of photography and film, poetry may create an image that does not describe but makes the reader a participant, an actor in its space.

Born in Istanbul, Murat Nemet-Nejat has lived in the US since 1959. Recent work includes Alphabet Dialogues/ Penis Monologues (with Standard Schaeffer), The Disappearance of Time, The Spiritual Life of Replicants, a translation of Seyhan Erozçelik’s Rosestrikes, Coffee Grinds, and the essay Istanbul Noir. He is working on a poem, The Structure of Escape.

Photo Credit:
Tom Henwood

Akilah Oliver Playing the In-Between

In this course we will explore how visual rhetoric and text play together to create an “in between” text – between genres, form, and expectations. Come prepared to work with images (yours and “found” and available ones) and a text that you create in dialogue with visual images.

Akilah Oliver is the author of four books of poetry: A Toast in the House of Friends, a(A)ugust,
The Putterer’s Notebook, and An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming to Greet. The she said dialogues: flesh memory is a book of experimental prose poetry which received the PEN American Center’s “Beyond Margins/Open Book” award. She is a co-founder of the avant-garde, feminist performance group The Sacred Naked Nature Girls, whose work continues to be the subject of critical study in performance theory.

Photo Credit:
Christina Frain & Clobe Elephants

Margaret Randall Writing From Our Other Selves

We will write, in participant’s preferred genre, out of deep connection with ancestral memory: animal, vegetable, mineral, and more. Writing exercises, workshop critique, and discussion.

Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, oral historian, photographer, and social activist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Landscape and connection are important in her work. Recent titles include Stones Witness (poetry), To Change the World: My Years in Cuba (memoir and essay),
and Their Backs to the Sea (poetry).

Damion Searls The Whole Fling of a Sentence

Although obviously grounded in differences, the practice of translation can be a powerful form of creative integration: of finding and making connections. Translators have to read for and create an interplay of parts, whether systems of rhyme and repetition in poetry or rhythm and “voice” in prose; in another sense, translators quite literally make the author’s voice their own, or make their own voice it. The course title is a phrase from Virginia Woolf, about translating from Greek.

Damion Searls has translated Rilke, Proust, Walser, Bachmann, Bernhard, and others, edited Thoreau’s Journal and a reverse-abridgment of Moby-Dick called ; or The Whale, and is the author most recently of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, a book of contemporary short stories rewritten from past stories. He has written for The Believer and his long poem “Moxomenon” is forthcoming in The Paris Review.

Julia Seko Letterpress Printing: On the Page

In this introductory workshop, we’ll set type, mix ink, cut paper, and print a collaborative project. We’ll study the interaction between the text and the printing process and let the transformative power of paper, ink, and metal reveal the word on the page.

Julia Seko is a letterpress printer, book artist, teacher, and proprietor of PS Press. Trained in letterpress at the Women’s Building in Los Angeles, she teaches at Naropa University, where she helped set up the letterpress printshop. Her work is in university and private collections and has been exhibited in the United States and abroad.

Special Guests

Brian Kiteley

Brian Kiteley recently published his third novel, The River Gods with FC2. He has also published two other novels, Still Life with Insects and I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing, and two books of fiction exercises, The 3 A.M. Epiphany and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough. Kiteley teaches at the University of Denver.

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