Verso 0.1
“Strophe, turning from one side to the other of the orchestra, the act of turning”
by Dionne Brand

Of The Blue Clerk, Brand notes “The things one has left unwritten or unsaid [in earlier work] would lead to a set of confrontations that would expose all the compromises, self-corrections, self-censorships, and sometimes nefarious and cowardly reasons for leaving the things unwritten and unsaid. So that’s a difficult process: to revisit the decisions of language, to revisit and critique the choices made even if those choices seemed, at the time, perfectly legitimate.”

This generative workshop uses The Blue Clerk as a point of departure to delve into our own personal inventories, the ones that “expose all the compromises”—the inventories that have accumulated for long spells but perhaps were never even written. What are your left-hand pages—the pages you avoid, rescind, or altogether abandon? What nascent knowledge exists there? What would it mean to etch these pages into some kind of existence? What does it mean to turn and return to an idea and what accumulates in the act of turning?

In addition to reading excerpts from The Blue Clerk, we will explore selections from John Keene’s Annotations and Inger Christensen’s Alphabet as examples of possible ways to inscribe left-hand pages. Through a series of prompts, meanderings and exercises, participants will accumulate their own left-hand pages or revisit previously written ones.