Reading
Annea Lockwood & Ruth Anderson: “Tête-à-tête” LP Release with ISSUE Project Room and Ergot Records
I have been struggling with belief in the most basic sense of the word. Belief. For months I inhabited long sequences of uninterrupted time where I dared to imagine the world without words. I visited the ocean and silently observed the waves. I stopped writing and practiced living a life without poems which is not the same as a life without poetry or the force of poetry.
It was in this break that I started to experience my writing and my relationship to poetry change in concert with the time spent watching the waves spilling, plunging, collapsing, surging.
This 5-week generative writing workshop is for those who have experienced a similar sense of doubt, silence, or withdrawal– an extended blankness– a crisis of belief. Inspired by the teachings and legacy of The Poetry Project, this workshop is intended to create space to dwell inside the sacred, devotional aspects of poetry. By “sacred” I mean language lost and forged in the break, in the presence of “a weird faith.” In risking belief, we’ll collectively encounter poetry as “the part / that no one sees,” to quote Cedar Sigo. Rather than workshop existing writings, we’ll draft new writings as we read and discuss works by Ari Banias, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Fred Moten, Alice Notley, Cedar Sigo, James Schuyler, C.D. Wright, and more.
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