In poetry, the perceived split between a self—the one who, finally, sits down alone and writes a poem—and a world, where people are variously grouped, where they try to live, grow, love, have sex, and not die, has been rendered a constant political problem. It raises questions like these: Is aloneness fragile? Is context? Can our poems be like teeth or bombs? Are they just little “odes to weakness”? Are they controlled by careerism, fashion, solipsism, our mystified social position, etc., or can we gain control of our expression? Do they require a congregation to come to life? Do they need other arts to make them move, make them more, enough? Are they machines that run on muscular intellectual labor to produce linguistic novelty? Are you a winner or a loser? What is your sexual capacity? What, as you write, are you doing to yourself? to other people? What are you working on? Are you working?

In this generative workshop-seminar, we'll use the formal and emotional resonances of "weakness" and "strength" to think through aesthetic strategies and political problems. We can complicate power and powerlessness, struggle and sacrifice, depression and ecstasy, while keeping our minds on the urgent problems that make us want to write at all. Readings may include selections from Mao, Simone White, Robert Duncan, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Leslie Scalapino, Raúl Zurita, June Jordan, Maya Martinez, R.Erica Doyle, Tilghman Goldsborough, Nicolás Guillén, Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey’s Discrepant Engagement, and other anthologies such as Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry; The Tent Generations: Palestinian Poems; Where is Vietnam? American Poets Respond. Maybe a film or some videos. Probably I’ll ask you all to write poems in a collective document but we’ll spend class time on discussion and free writing.