Reading
Daniel Borzutzky & Vincent Toro
James Hillman writes of the mythic underworld as an ancient tool used to spatialize the synchrony of death and life, and to disclose hidden contents of what we might now consider the psyche. Writing for this class will formulate similar terrain: if writing requires and produces distance, we will attend to the opportunities of distance's shadowed poetics. Symbols of separation—bridges, letters, borders, underworlds—will be instruments for communicating about and across impossible distances: of death, estrangement, silence, and exile. We will consider technologies for covering and annotating distance—such as walking, yelling, dreaming—and use ambulatory practices to lend writing content, or meter. We will also experiment with the triangular topographies of epistolary form—between writer, addressee, reader; text, and the distances it traveled—to elaborate the terrain around conditions of separation.
This workshop will focus on generative writing practice, with regular sharing and optional peer review. Texts by Hillman, Joanna Morra, Ann Dufourmantelle, Mahmoud Darwish, Renee Gladman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Robert Glück, and others will guide our study.
