:: Background

This talk and workshop investigates the experimental verse and prose writings of four women--Cecilia Vicuña, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anne Waldman, and Erica Hunt--who, in their work, address the physical body as fluid and changeable, sometimes embattled, but knowing. Their writings, in structure and language, do not privilege traditional notions of coherence and fixed meanings. This contrasts with other kinds of more traditional writings that view the body and "the body of literature" in dichotomies: male/female, sick/well, old/young, mono-lingual/bi-lingual, poem/prose, individual/political, published/unpublished, reader/writer, and so on.

The talk and performance of texts is followed by a workshop where participants create poetry or prose work that, through free-writing combined with cut and paste composition methods, reflects (or reflects on) the body in the world from this perspective of "dis-ease" and connectivity.

How will this kind of deliberate experimental writing make us feel? Is there something true and freeing about it or is it confusing, tension-inducing, depressing? Will we end up with something beautiful or awkward or beautifully awkward? You don't need to have any prior experience with poetry or creative prose for this workshop. Just come with a willingness to pay attention to language, and a willingness to make meaning from language in perhaps new ways.

:: Workshop Description

Performances: We "performed" the Vicuña, Hak Kyung Cha, Erica Hunt, and Anne Waldman texts using different techniques that included call and response, choruses, whispering the non-English parts of texts "behind" the reader who read in English. We wanted to break down categories of reading: that reading is solo, non-collaborative, silent, and so on.

We solicited information from the participants about what they noticed about the poems having to do with "the body" or bodies. A brief discussion followed. We then asked them to write down notes to the following questions: What were you taught about the body from family members? in school? from doctors?

We then passed out piece of paper with an outline of a woman's body. We had participants make notes on the page, over the body, around the body, anything, anywhere.

Next, we asked participants to compose a poem using the following: their notes from the questions asked, some words/information from their drawings, some piece of text or words or phrases from the texts that we performed, something borrowed from the person sitting next to them, and something in a language other than English.

We shared the poems.

:: Read some of the poems from the workshop by clicking here.

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