Wednesday, March 5th, 2025, 5:00PM-7:30PM
Meeting will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Odeum and Bamboo Garden; limit 12 students. General registration will open on Tuesday, December 17th at 10:00AM.
Beginnings, middles, ends; sequences, interruptions, diversions, and circulation; stanzas, serials, circuits, and the stage of the page. Understanding narrative dynamics, movement, and arrangement is as important for poets as it is for fiction writers.
In this class, we will take guidance from the Tamil practice of Kolam–an ancient and contemporary folk art of drawing on stoops and thresholds – to consider storytelling practices that evoke and sustain threshold spaces. We will read, with care and curiosity, texts by Myung Mi Kim, Bhanu Kapil, and M. NourbeSe Philip to suggest, together, how these poets have countered received notions of “plot” and “narrative arc” to invent other ways of storying through poetry. We will articulate our own thresholds that define and open us, and step out to what may be (or can become) our own ways of telling stories about what was, what is, and what is (or needs to) arrive.
This class requires some preparation (reading) and a portion of this session will take place outdoors. Some of the practices may require bending, sitting on the ground, walking and standing. Those who need accommodations can reach out to the organizers and the class activities will be adapted to include writers of all bodyminds.
Our guides, our lights:
- Myung Mi Kim, “[accumulation of land]” from Penury. Please also listen to the performance.
- Bhanu Kapil, excerpt from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.
- M. NourbeSe Philip, “Discourse on the Logic of Language” from She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks.