Woodland Pattern Book Center

Sundays Feb. 21, 28, and March 7 | 2–4 pm CT (online)

Cost: $100 General | $90 Members 

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In this workshop we will devote half of our time talking about the work of leftist and proletariat poets who were writing in the United States during the Great Depression and further into the 1930s. We’ll also read some of Mark Nowak’s critical work on how lineage construction obscured certain “social poets.” We will devote the other half to reading contemporary poets whose work is developing a field of anti-racial capitalist (anti-neoliberal, anti-colonial . . .) poetry in the US and read some of Chris Nealon’s critical work on poetry in late-late capitalism. The workshop will be reading-heavy (individually outside of class) from a PDF I will provide, with gathering time spent on discussion. I will give writing prompts related to the reading but there will be no critique of work. At the end of the workshop everyone will be invited to submit a poem for a pamphlet that will be printed and shared.

Writers we may read include Kenneth Fearing, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Lorine Niedecker, John Wheelwright, Ernesto Cardenal, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baraka, Claudia Rankine, Wendy Rose, Mark Nowak, Chris Nealon, Kevin Davies, Ted Rees, Jasmine Gibson, and D.S. Marriott. 

Alice Neel’s Portrait of Kenneth Fearing, 1935. The title of this workshop is taken from a Fearing poem.