This workshop is sponsored by Wendy’s Subway in Brooklyn, NY, and will take place online.
In 2011, Time Magazine asked John Ashbery if he made a living from his poetry, to which he said, “Heavens no. Gosh no. Shucks no. No, not at all.” The poet is in a bizarre situation of always having to do something else to meet our material needs—maybe poetry-adjacent, maybe not. Many of the poets we will be reading in this workshop bridge the difference between making a living and making art by writing about work, registering varying manners of capitalist critique and antiauthoritarian/antibureaucratic spirit, using the tension that can arise when they have to participate, to some degree, in what they critique. The uniting factor of the readings is that all the poets (who are primarily US-based) bring an amazing vitality to the page by creating their own multidimensional, capacious, and just systems. Their lingual energy is whipped into an antidote against the despair we are meant to feel, by capitalist design, about the ordinary day, on an ongoing basis. Pandemic days are not ordinary days—the cruelty of the design has been made ever-more transparent. Poets are the artists, the inventors, we can go to for a new, un-nostalgic normal.
Some preliminary questions to answer in conversation and in writing throughout the workshop: how often, and why, is the poet asked to justify their existence by explaining the use/value/role of poetry? If you put your weekly pay, or deficit, in a poem what happens to that number? Why is the US dollar bill so creepy? We’ll discuss the reading and share our own writing inspired by the readings during class.
Some of the poets whose work we’ll read are: Krystal Languell, Ryan Eckes, Wanda Coleman, Antler, Jill Magi, Sean Bonney, Bernadette Mayer, Stephanie Young, Jeff Derksen, Maged Zahar, Lorenzo Thomas, Hattie Gossett, Mónica de la Torre, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Simone White, the Worker Writers COVID haiku project, and poems from the anthology Ritual and Capital. Participants will be able to add to a growing bibliography on the subject.