Saturdays, April 6th,13th and 20th, 2024, 10:00AM - 12:00PM

Meetings will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. General registration is now open! Register here.

Climate chaos is here. The question is no longer “What can we do about it?” but “How will we live here?” In this course, we’ll explore and create poetic and visual scores to help us navigate our uncertain climate future. A “score” is a loose set of instructions open to interpretation and variation. Musicians and dancers sometimes use them for structured improvisation, and Yoko Ono’s well-known event scores (Grapefruit, 1964) reframed everyday objects, ideas, and actions as potential performance pieces. To generate our own scores, we’ll consider successful ecological or cultural practices and strategies in the Sonoran Desert. What instructions might a kangaroo rat, who quenches its thirst with seeds, offer—and in what form? What advice might maíz, cultivated here for 4,000 years, give? Or someone who grinds corn and forms it into tortillas? Part poetry, part visionary folklife, and part collective dream-space, this workshop will help us create and (perhaps even enact!) a set of unconventional, poetic “prepper’s tools”—informed by ecology and culture—for life to come in the Sonoran Desert.