This is an 8-week poetry workshop class offered by Surplace in collaboration with Schole Alternative School.
Class will take place on Wednesdays from 6-9pm over the course of 8 weeks. 
Class dates will be: July 4, July 11, July 25, Aug 1, Aug 8, Aug 15, Aug 22, Aug 29 (**no class July 18)

Because I have always had many certain problems with form, I consider myself a poet. […]
There is no stability of form; all science extols that. Body is an interruption in another interruptive continuum, and vice versa. The reason to create form might be as a way of charting its fleet malleability. Or perhaps form means morph. I wish.
—Stacy Doris, “I Have to Check My Email,” (2007)

Can we think of form as something other than constraint? What if one’s whole life experience were the constraint, as it is for the Afro-Cuban poet Kamau Brathwaite? And where is the body in this? This workshop, open to all, entertains a troubled, tentaculur curiosity. Here we’ll consider form in relation to time, to response-ability (Haraway), to force, to seeing-skin. How is form energy, as opposed to shape? Together, we’ll attempt to track its formations in our own works, and in the poetics/poetry of several modern and contemporary writers. Long Soldier, Moten, NourbeSe-Philip, Celan, Stacy Doris, Aisha Sasha John and Lisa Robertson, among others, will be our fellow poeologists…

All poets/makers welcome.

The class work is comprised mainly of group critique of writing you bring in, discussion of texts/videos, and of writing exercises designed to improve technique and explore new approaches to creation.

Questions of composition, rhythm, gesture, engagement with broader social and political values, the body, and others will be considered.

Readings
Stacy Doris, “I Have to Check My E-mail”
Paul Celan, “The Meridian”
“Lisa Robertson & Aisha Sasha John: In Conversation”, Book*hug Interview
M. NourbeSe-Philip, “Ignoring Poetry (a work in progress)”
Fred Moten, “An Interview with Fred Moten” Parts I and II, Lit Hub.
Kimiko Hahn, “Still Writing the Body”
CA Conrad, “The Right to Manifest Manifesto”
Layli Long Soldier, “Poetry as Prayer,” The Creative Independent

Sarah Burgoyne is an experimental poet. Saint Twin (Mansfield: 2016), a Cortázar-like construction of long walks, tiny chapters, whiskied reportage, flash narratives, lyric fables and short myths in which sequences begin, disappear, then reappear, was a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize in Poetry (2016), won a prize from l’Académie de la vie littéraire (2017) and is currently shortlisted for a Canadian ReLit Award. She is presently working on a manuscript inspired by Camus’ murderous beach in L’étranger (the one on which Meursault, annoyed by the blinding sun, shoots a man for no reason), which takes up the relentless heat of the sun and its potential for transference–in this case, from atmosphere to human interaction (Camus)–and within the realm of the project, from gendered dominance to gendered harassment. Thelma and Louise appear. The sun sings. There is majestic astroturf. Burgoyne curates a (small) gallery and hosts a reading/performance series in her apartment called Puny Times Gallery.