Lately I’ve been reading (and watching and listening to) lots of horror, weird stories, uncanny trash, and fuzzy poems — the kind of stuff where reality looks formal and organized just before it bends or explodes or melts. Maybe it has something to do with the feeling that the smoothness of the internet, its look of sufficiency, is fatally rubbing up against an undreamt-of reality. It feels like a good, stinky time for poetry to be haunted by the real. In this five-week workshop, we’ll read and write and talk about the smooth surface, the furriness of mold, the traces of horror in the heaps of normative grammar that pile up, softly, like dirty laundry. Along the way, we’ll devise some methods, tactics, and rituals to invite a spirit to hover into that smoothness and rot just a little more — perhaps some presence like that can explain a few things.
Events
Reading
Dis/Course
The Circle Room: the presence of touch in the five stages of life – a Dis/Course Meeting with Georgia Wall, The Ceremonialist
Reading
The Alphabet of Revelations: A Halloween Benefit for The Poetry Project
Reading
Cean Gamalinda & Kate Schapira
Reading
Lydia Davis & Holly Melgard
Reading
Lindsey Boldt & Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves
Workshop
Smooth Ghosts — 5-Session Workshop with Jared Stanley
Dis/Course
Touch / Don’t Touch: Dis/Course with Gabrielle Civil
Reading
Karen Finley at The John Giorno Foundation
Workshop
fantastic ekphrastic experiments — a 5-Session Workshop with t'ai freedom ford
Reading
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza & Nat Raha
Reading