The Poetry Project

Workshop

Mud Walking; 5-Session Workshop with Christopher Rey Pérez

When Drakeo the Ruler clarified in a Dazed interview that mud walking is leaning, the Texan in me already knew that just because you're moving slowly doesn't mean you're staying put. After playing countless DJ Screw mixtapes side-by-side cumbias rebajadas (“slowed cumbias”) in my car, after tracing anonymous footsteps at the silty banks of the Río Grande, and after feeling—in light of ongoing genocides in Palestine and elsewhere—like the present is as “clear as mud,” I want to know what mud walking can offer us poets as a mode of traversing the earth. How might it alter the gait of our poems? This workshop will develop and explore the poetic possibilities of “mud walking” on and off the page as an approach to both slow down and lean into the tracks we're leaving and the sub/stances (read: being, material but also "standing under, being present") we're working with. Along with reading and discussing texts that include Néstor Perlongher’s “Neobarroso” (“Muddy Baroque”), excerpts from Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, Drakeo the Ruler’s "Mud Walking," José Gorostiza's "Death Without End," and corridos and corridos tumbados examples, we'll explore mud in its physical and temporal aspects, trying out a few experiments to alter our poems and the ways we walk with/inside them.

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